Difference of Opinion

about Difference of Opinion

2007-12-18T17:21:00.002Z

The following articles, reprinted by agreement with IOP Publishing Ltd, formed a regular diary column in Scientific Computing World magazine betweeen September 1997 and February 2000.

Difference of Opinion was co-written by Ray Girvan and Felix Grant under the pen names Babbage and Lovelace. The two personae do not represent the two authors; every diary entry was jointly written by us both, as a team. Rather, they represent different aspects of the computing world: loosely, Babbage is interested in hardware, and Lovelace in software and philosophical aspects. Copyright belongs to the co-authors; contact either Ray Girvan or Felix Grant if you require more information:

ray[at]raygirvan·co·uk or felix[at]felix-grant·co·uk

Creatures great and small - digitized

2000-12-01T00:01:00.000Z

Many things are more concrete in their seeming than in their objective reality. Lovelace's friend, Mr Babbage, recently visited in some irritation; a street musician had insulted his numerical pedantry (not to mention questioning his legitimacy) when he argued that the new millennium begins with the year 2001 rather than 2000.

Lovelace could offer him little solace, believing that the millennium lies more in human minds. Whatever the reality, calendar mathematics is overwhelmed by our perception (no doubt influenced by Analytical Engine displays) of the instant when the digits cascade to 2000. And yet this powerful moment is illusion rooted in one cultural system, meaningless against the vast history of the cosmos.

Still, unwillingly, Lovelace has been drawn into the millennial mood. She feels an urge to look forward and backward, as if this arbitrary date were a meaningful cusp. In this frame of mind, for example, she watched a BBC televisual series "Walking With Dinosaurs". Through Analytical Engine graphics, this project brought Mesozoic fossils to an illusion of life in Lovelace's own Holocene parlour. Despite some scientific reservations, one central achievement remains: the animation exposed fallacious assumptions, producing a new biomechanical understanding.

Giant long-necked creatures swung their heads horizontally for efficiency, tails not tripod supports but counterweights. Grounded pterosaurs folded their wings for a stilt-like strut. Marine reptiles swam, limbs in beautiful counter-phase, with a land-born walking rhythm.

Lovelace found this virtual resurrection of the ancient and huge a pleasing balance to the modelling of the new and minuscule 'nano-machines' of which Babbage is so fond. Even its failings serve as a caution for futurologists using similar methods. These great saurians also serve as reminders of mortality, of the vastness of time, and of the strangeness and ubiquity of the phenomenon of life - a phenomenon soon to be joined by various digital, mechanical and cyborg intelligences.

"In the beginning was the Word". Lovelace has always been enchanted by the image behind that resonant Talmudic vision: that a creator breathed one vast, vibrant word and the information therein crystallised the universe from chaos. When we take the role of creator, the word is small and digital, breathing life into correspondingly small silicon universes. Looking from our invented millennial gateway, however, Lovelace does not feel that the ambition or reach of the word has in any way changed.

Navigating across the sea of science

2000-02-01T00:01:00.000Z

A new year (and to many, a new millennium) finds Babbage, appropriately, writing a few steps from The Time Machine, a West Country museum which has shed its dusty name and image. As Babbage watches young visitors exclaim in wonder over exhibits which would have bored them in the old Woodspring Museum, his initial disapproval has turned to enthusiasm. In an era of forbidding 'big science', anything that draws enquiring outsiders is to be applauded.

One such outsider was Mr John Harrison, inventor of another time machine, the nautical chronometer. Having read "Longitude", Ms Dava Sobel's best-selling book, Babbage felt a great kinship with Harrison, who also struggled a lifetime with a nascent machine and a government funding body. The focus of the scientific establishment has shifted: private wealth in Harrison's time; government dominance in Babbage's; and multinational corporations nowadays. The move has been inexorably away from the individual contributor into large and lavishly funded corporate teams.

But predictions of the demise of amateur and other individual scientists seem premature. As the flood of scientific data swells, massive funding of corporate science, inadvertently, feeds the individual worker. The future now seems to hold, Babbage feels, not survival of the big at the expense of the little, but continuation of an old symbiosis.

For instance, Babbage just read of globally distributed seismic data gathering, and of a network of four supercomputers, 10,000 miles wide (perhaps the precursor of a Global Analytical Engine). These, the 'particle accelerators' of information science, require investment and cooperation only deliverable by corporate resources.

Nevertheless, there are simultaneous moves toward dissemination of Petabyte-level data sets, and the accessibility of huge reservoirs of reusable data through standard XML-based office software. Much of this data is, or will be, publicly visible - restricting access is becoming less cost-effective than transparency - and much of its potential is waiting for any questing mind which happens upon it.

Young scientists, now being surprised into intellectual curiosity by The Time Machine and its relatives, will turn to the Web, where they will find themselves in a sea of new data, barely charted, awaiting their exploration. Big science will get bigger, but the immediate future of the individual seems secure. Even as Babbage retrieves his teacup, spilt by delighted youngsters running from Mammoths to Marconi, he finds this thought both exciting and comforting.

Robotics get to the heart of the matter

1999-10-01T00:01:00.001+01:00

Babbage recently underwent a small operation to remove a benign intestinal polyp, and was most impressed by the surgical technology. He was not etherized, but merely under conscious sedation. Nor was any incision involved; the procedure was conducted entirely via a prehensile probe equipped with a fibre-optic camera and biopsy tools.

For more major operations too, the safety advantages of minimally invasive procedures are becoming well-known. In traditional heart surgery, a striking development is the so-called 'daVinci' machine now in some medical facilities. Akin to the Waldo remote manipulator, a daVinci probe works, within the chest of a patient, as the surgeon's eyes and inhumanly steady hands. The surgeon can operate, without fear of 'the shakes', from a non-sterile environment, while patient trauma is greatly reduced by the small 'keyhole' incisions rather than the usual single, massive sternum breach.

At present, daVinci is the size of a room, and only a tool. But the future implications are even more revolutionary. In a university prototyping lab, Babbage was shown an automated version - a shoebox-sized ‘daVinciette' - learning surgery. Its patients were eggs of plastic gel, each with a caseless clockwork watch for a heart, the surrounding gel skin embedded with wire mesh and red ink bubbles. Some watches were deliberately damaged, and the daVinciette's task was to mend these without interfering with the obstacles in the skin.

As Babbage watched, the daVinciette took each egg, and proceeded to identify its watch, penetrate the gel skin for an examination, then attempt repair when necessary. At each stage, it could refer the case for human attention. Finally it wound the mechanism, then classified the patient as dead (the watch not ticking, or ink in the works), alive, or to be referred. The daVinciette was not the best of surgeons: around a third of its patients died, and one in ten was referred. Nevertheless, its record was slowly improving, and viewed alongside other medical robotics advances, this brings the 'Aesculapius machines' and 'autodocs' of science fiction into the realm of likely futures.

Of the medical endorobotics experts Babbage spoke to, some foresaw automated surgery useful in battlefield or other hazardous environments. Others saw brighter prospects, a way out of resource shortages in a world of escalating clinical demand. But whatever the applications for daVinci and the daVinciettes, their increasing part in medicine seems to Babbage inevitable.

Escaping from the footnotes of history

1999-06-01T00:01:00.000+01:00

It is always pleasant to meet kindred spirits, and Babbage recalls his introduction in 1840 to fellow Devonian Mr Thomas Fowler. A bank manager from Torrington, Fowler was visiting London to demonstrate his wooden calculating engine. Babbage thought that the device, of sliding-rod construction and using the ternary number system, showed remarkable promise. Its inventor, alas, died three years later, leaving it in pieces. Soured by the experience of competitors copying his Thermosiphon central heating system, Mr Fowler left no drawings for the calculator’s reconstruction. The only record is a commemorative window in St Michael’s Church, Torrington.

Unfortunately this is all too common a story. In our electronic age, mechanical computers seem destined to be mere quaint footnotes to history. In reality, their significance was considerable. Notably, the Turing ‘Bombe’, crucial to Britain's decoding of German Enigma messages in World War II, was a programmable mechanical computer, albeit not “absolutely general” machine like the Analytical Engine.

Mr James Redin’s “X-number World of Calculators” at http://www.dotpoint.com/xnumber/vintage.htm celebrates hand-cranked comptometers, slide-adders, and other descendants of early devices such as the Pascaline and Leibniz Stepped Drum calculators. Mechanical calculators were the mainstay of businesses until only a few decades ago. One of the earliest such devices, the abacus, is still in use today.

Recent developments, however, may yet revive mechanical calculation in mainstream science. At the web site of Sandia National Laboratories, USA (http://www.mdl.sandia.gov/micromachine/) Babbage recently learned of some delightful ‘micromachines’ no larger than a pollen grain. Formed as an integral part of a CMOS microchip, these devices include locks, shutters, sensors, encoders, and even a steam engine.

Moving down to atomic scales takes us into the realm of Dr K Eric Drexler’s ‘nanotechnology’. Atomic-scale gears and bearings are theoretically possible, and from these, nanocomputers could be built. Babbage finds most amusing the thought of a nano-sized Analytical Engine driven by a steam motor little larger. A more likely component, however, is the sliding ‘molecular abacus’ reported in the February/March 1999 issue of Scientific Computing World. It seems that Mr Fowler’s sliding-rod concept, albeit on a far different scale from his prototype, could at last find application.

A footnote from Babbage: I was delighted to read in the Western Morning News, August 30th 2000, an item about two reconstructions of Mr Fowler's Engine by Roy Foster, an engineer from Torrington, and Mark Glusker, a product designer from California. The construction was made possible through the work of historian Pamela Vass, also of Torrington, whose research led to the rediscovery of Fowler's notes on his Engine's design, given as a deathbed dictation to his daughter. A short biography of Fowler may be found at www.thomasfowler.org.uk; Mark Glusker's model may be seen at www.mortati.com/glusker/.

A fossilized warning for the digital world

1999-04-01T00:01:00.000+01:00

Lovelace was amused to read of Hallucigenia, one of the denizens of the early explosion of bizarre Cambrian species found in the Burgess Shale of British Columbia. This animal, it was thought, walked on fourteen jointless spines and sported a row of stubby tentacles on its back: until a better specimen revealed that palaeontologists had the creature upside-down! We may smile, but this shows how easy misinterpretation can be, when we meet unprecedented biology.

This problem may arise, too, when we begin to encounter digital life. Can we trust our perception of its possibilities? The growing uses of digital life-forms show striking parallels to our treatment of organic creatures: for exploitation, study, amusement, artistic and scientific inspiration, modification for supposed aesthetics, and so on. Yet it seems that the caucus of civil servants and scientists, whose speculations on Internet life-forms so exasperated Babbage recently, failed to see these parallels. They talked, for instance, of extermination. Yet in the organic world, as experience with DDT and the mosquito testifies, this measure hardly has a track record of success. Far more species, indeed, have been eliminated by accident than by design.

Conversely, decision-makers seem equally incapable of applying to real-world biology the understanding of genetic processes given us by digital life. As the Digital Burgess Conference shows, the Burgess Shale is inspiring to firms such as BT, who hope to evolve real-time systems from a diverse ‘digital soup’. Artists, too, delight in exploring a medium open to boundless mutations. The mutability of such models should, however, sound a note of caution over real-world genetic modification.

A world populated with creations such as a bean with a scorpion gene may well represent a new analogue of the Burgess Shale. This system is no longer stabilised by aeons of unmitigated competition: new mutations can be leap-frogged past initial risks to compete in fully established form, and will probably cross-breed with unmodified forms. We may be on the threshold of a world in which neither digital nor biological life follow evolutionary paths predictable from past patterns.

Human beings are notoriously slow to learn the lessons of the past. Lovelace fears that we are destined to repeat, in both digital and biotechnological arenas, the mistakes of our own ecological history.

Virtual recipes for a primaeval soup

1999-02-01T00:01:00.001Z

The passing of a year stirs recollections; and Babbage recalls with regret his travails in communicating to successive governments the vast possibilities of the Analytical Engine. But he was recently privileged to attend a policy studies ‘think-tank’, where he was startled to hear sober scientists, industrialists, civil servants and politicians considering the scenario of self-aware intelligence arising, unplanned, within the structure of the Internet.

Surprisingly few delegates rejected the idea, though a unified ‘spirit of the Internet’ was dismissed as a fairy-tale concept. The rest tended to conclude that the present Internet closely resembles the primaeval biotic "soup", and rapidly assumed that such intelligence would be not singular but plural.

The exact nature of potential intelligences was hotly debated. Would there be a few powerful mentalities, perhaps even superhuman? Flocks of mutating "shades" of vertebrate-like intelligence? Or a myriad of individually mindless beings summing to a whole, like termites? Babbage was astonished to hear, despite disagreements, estimates that such entities could appear within seven to fifty years.

One delegate asked about the prospects for exterminating such entities were it deemed necessary. There was broad agreement that attempts were inevitable, yet pointless and even counter-productive. Starvation, the denial of computational resources, would damage infrastructures dependent on the Net. Engineering digital predators could accelerate the evolutionary process in the survivors if it failed. If successful, such predators could present a new, more virulent, problem of their own.

How worthwhile are such conclusions? On hearing Babbage’s account, Lovelace commented that some of the delegates’ assumptions seemed simple analogies of the problems of dealing with biological pests. This may be valid; at the 1997 Digital Burgess Conference (see http://www.biota.org/) biologists likened current digital biology to the multifarious organisms of the Pre-Cambrian Burgess Shale. But some assumptions seemed closer to images from popular culture: the fear of a hostile Internet recalls Terminator and many other cinematic visions.

Making his way back to his hotel, Babbage wondered how Lovelace's transplanted human souls and the predicted natives would react to each other - and how he came to be seriously asking himself this question. He had longed for recognition of the Analytical Engine in decision-making circles, but this gathering left him feeling he had imbibed a dose of Lovelace's laudanum.

Modern interfaces for old senses

1998-12-01T00:01:00.000Z

Even as Lovelace considered Mr Babbage's distaste at the interpenetrations of silicon and flesh, she read of the current work of Dr Roy Bakay of Emory University, Atlanta. This neurosurgeon's team has pioneered vitreous brain implants enabling paralysed patients to send cursor commands directly to an Analytical Engine.

Lovelace was already amazed at advances in surgery, such as two years ago when a young friend had a severed foot reattached and was walking within months. More surprising still is the recent transplant of a complete forearm onto a patient who lost his own a quarter century ago. Such miracles highlight the brain's marvellous capacity, even limited by its inability to regenerate central nervous tissue, to reconnect and reroute.

Vladimir Ulyanov (better known as Lenin) once told his followers, "If an individual dies, so do his cell and its neighbours; but the organisation remains and will talk around the wreckage". This seems a universal principle, recalling how the Internet routes around damage (or censorship). The brain too follows this logic, as we may read in Dr Oliver Sacks' wonderful accounts of the adaptations of patients in overcoming neurological disasters.

The human mind, as Babbage noted, can accept diverse and simultaneous input through its natural senses. Its very generality, however, extends to novel connections. Finding that a motor neurone cluster moves a screen cursor rather than a now-useless toe, the brain adapts to the new tool. Nor need its architecture be mapped in detail. As experience of cochlear implants shows, given a multi-electrode contact in the appropriate region, the brain rapidly learns to use the unfamiliar 'interface'.

In a world with such neural interfacing, fictional fantasies will inevitably move to everyday implementation. Futurologists at BT's Martlesham laboratories suggest that complete human 'souls' will be copied to backing store (an idea pursued by novelist Mr Greg Bear through his Eon cycle). More prosaically, and a nearer prospect, a subset of a person's expertise might be copied to control, for instance, an industrial plant.

Such machine entities, fragments of thought transplanted to electronic containers, cannot be human: but their adaptability will survive and operate in inconceivably new forms as ... something else. Perhaps they will merge or cross-fertilise with artificial software entities, or with the progeny of Rodney Brooks' robotic creations? Extraordinary vistas indeed, for minds designed for foraging in the forest margins of a tropical rift valley.

From cyborgs to wearable computers

1998-11-01T00:01:00.000Z

Babbage has, on occasion, expressed misgivings about the various interpenetrations of silicon and flesh. Why risk ‘cyborging’ oneself, when a wearable Analytical Engine can upgrade natural faculties through a removable carapace of information technology?

Babbage has encountered a number of such Engines, whose apparent variety simplifies to three essential types. First, and most straightforward, are those which deliver to their wearer a body of expertise. Babbage was recently shown helmet-mounted rigs for use by emergency and other workers in locations where expert support would be otherwise impossible. While video and audio devices provide outward communication, incoming data presentation derives from the ‘head-up displays’ of military aviators: half-silvered visors and mesh diaphragm earpieces that overlay vision and hearing.

A second type uses similar methods for controlling remote devices from a safer location. Babbage revisited a North Sea fish farm where he had been required to flounder in a diving suit through cold, murky waters. This time, he was given a headset and belt control pack, and instead promenaded around catwalks in pleasant sunshine. Some fathoms below, a small submersible vehicle kept automatic pace, relaying hydrophonic sounds and six video channels for Babbage’s edification.

A more alarming setting demonstrated the third type: that which amplifies the wearer's sensory analysis. In an urban warfare training ground, Babbage watched an infantry patrol under simulated sniper fire. Even as one man rolled for cover, a computer about his person was analysing the sound and its echoes, passing the source coordinates both to a wrist display and as aiming data to the optical sight of his weapon.

Although somewhat shaken, Babbage considered other applications. Sudden loud sounds might equally signal danger to firefighters or workers in volcanic areas, as could subtler sounds: the creak of a stressed component, or the rush of leaking industrial coolant. Other senses might be similarly augmented, and combination with headset displays could allow whole teams to track invisible and inaudible phenomena - say, a flock of bats in the dark - through a shared virtual environment.

This technology is closer to the everyday than Babbage had imagined. With many people already routinely carrying telecommunications and palmtop computing devices, and video cameras costing no more than a waterproof coat, no great conceptual leap is required to envision their connection. Who can say to what uses science might not put this sensory expansion?

Media fall along the path of progress

1998-10-01T00:01:00.001+01:00

Over the summer break, Lovelace found time for leisure reading, and was much moved by Mr Keith Roberts’ alternate-history novel Pavane, a haunting work of speculative fiction recalling the timeless Wessex of Thomas Hardy. Her friend Babbage, however, was far more interested in its technical merits, and praised one section, The Signaller, for its accurate depiction of a mechanical semaphore network.

By Lovelace’s adulthood, semaphore stations had been superseded by the electric telegraph, now gaining just recognition as a precursor to modern data communications. This autumn, Walker & Company publishes The Victorian Internet by Mr Tom Standage, which explores how telegraphy caused its own radical ‘information explosion’ in the last century.

The electric telegraph was, however, built upon earlier techniques. Lovelace was fascinated to read an online book called The Early History of Data Networks (http://www.it.kth.se/docs/early_net). The authors, Dr Gerard J Holzmann and Professor Björn Pehrson, discuss communication by beacons, mirrors, flags and mechanical semaphore chains. They find, by the early 1800s, the basics of modern digital data transfer protocols, such as ‘handshaking’, data packets, route encoding, and error checking. It seems, as Ecclesiastes reminds us, that “there is no new thing under the sun”.

But such continuity is by no means inevitable. Even over the last decade, the dominance of the digital Analytical Engine has progressively driven out analogue methods in telephony, musical reproduction and television. From the dawn of written history, the road of progress is littered with such ‘dead media’, a term coined by science fiction author Mr Bruce Sterling, who has created an excellent historical compilation at "http://griffinmultimedia.edu/~deadmedia/". We may find the Incas’ knotted-wool quipu, cuneiform, floral codes, or the wax-cylinder gramophone quaint compared to a hard disk or a burst of telemetry data from a deep space probe. But all media are conceptually identical in carrying packets of data, and the dead may shed light on the living.

Lovelace is very much in sympathy with the view of Soviet historian Mr Roy Medvedyev, that we can learn as much of our destination from the road by which we arrived (and even from the turnings which we did not take) as from our present position. Asking why, in the past, we took one path and abandoned another, why we opened this gate and not that, can be a valuable mirror on the present.

Artificial life begins its own evolution

1998-09-01T00:01:00.000+01:00

“To every thing there is a season,” says the Book of Ecclesiastes, and Babbage finds it satisfying that two scientific advances that ‘missed’ each other historically should at last find their season and flourish together. When Mr Charles Darwin set out his theory of evolution in The Origin of Species in 1859, Babbage’s computing engines were already a curiosity, unfunded and fading from official memory. But now, as a new millennium approaches, Darwinism and Analytical Engine are intricately entwined, and we are seeing Engine programs that evolve over time via a process of mutation, mating and selection.

A brief excursion upon the Internet finds many examples of genetic programming, which evolves populations of programs in a mimicry of Darwin's ‘survival of the fittest’. In the field of artificial intelligence (AI) especially, this solves problems ranging from the academic, such as the University of Michigan's GAIA agent which analyses radar images to classify sea ice roughness, to the recreational, such as the Spanish GENEURA team’s MasterMind game server.

Genetic programs are often teamed with neural networks, another tool developed from the same biological analogy. Examples of neural-genetic algorithms include Advanced Investment Technology's stocks and shares analyst, and the Danish-Italian art software, Artificial Painter.

However, a British company, CyberLife (http://www.cyberlife.co.uk) has gone further with an innovative marriage of AI with biochemistry. Its synthetic organisms, ‘norns’, possess neural network brains bathed in a sea of virtual biochemicals that stimulate or suppress their response to stimuli. In an ecology of virtual plants and animals, the norns adapt over generations through natural selection. Their present applications include a charming software toy, Creatures, but norns might see a darker future as artificial military pilots.

Are norns truly autonomous? Babbage recalls Lovelace’s view - that the Analytical Engine is limited to “whatever we know how to order it to perform” - as but one expression of the claim that AI is, at heart, merely a wealth of carefully encoded human experience. Even if not consciously applied, this experience might still colour the programmers’ assumptions of the rules underlying life.

But with norns, interestingly, unprogrammed properties have emerged, such as bees swarming, and plants adapting to different conditions. Babbage wonders if technology is poised to evolve in ways that take it beyond human understanding. Perhaps with these techniques, we are beginning to witness not just life as we know it, but life as it could be?

The Web: science or 'green ink'?

1998-07-01T00:01:00.000+01:00

This month finds Lovelace in a reality-doubting mood again, this time concerning the World Wide Web. By allowing contacts no longer limited by social credentials or geography, the Web agrees with Lovelace’s free-wheeling and curious spirit. Yet it carries new uncertainties. How does one trust who and what one finds?

The problem is not merely personal. Lovelace, misled by the amusing Robokitten picture, assumed April’s “artificial brain” story to be a seasonal hoax. Not so: a Web search revealed the artificial intelligence researcher Dr Hugo de Garis to be very much real. Proof, however, was not straightforward. Unfamiliar with AI hardware, Lovelace was unable to judge the technical credentials on his Japanese home page. Ultimately, she sought evidence of peer review, and took his name on prestigious AI conference lists as conclusive.

Lovelace found the experience depressing. On venturing beyond her own specialism, she had immediately to fall back upon the scientific world’s conventional reliance on restricted social interaction. This system has always seemed to Lovelace inefficient, nepotist and inherently subject to ossification. Nevertheless, it undeniably worked on its own terms; similar monopolies on communication have upheld socio-political hierarchies throughout history.

It is the modern view to applaud democratisation of access, but when anyone can publish, how do we identify trustworthy material? In the words of Polish scientific visionary Stanislav Lem, "truth can rebel against censorship, but what is to be done when it is drowned in a universal hum of spurious half truths and falsehoods?"

Judging real science is hardly clear-cut. Babbage, after all, took nearly two centuries to be vindicated; but his friend Mr Andrew Crosse, who once dined in Royal Society circles, is now thought a crank. Most checks are provisional. We have to assume that self-published pages may be promotional. We can watch the typography for the electronic equivalent of the rant in green ink, and other critical routines exist. See, for example, Mr Russell Turpin of the University of Texas on characterising quack theories (http://public.logica.com/~stepneys/sf/quack.htm).

While such rules-of-thumb may only echo Lovelace’s prejudices, they can be checked against the reader's common sense. But with medium and message advancing almost daily into the unknown, we cannot always rely on experience. It seems we must evolve novel procedures for validating identity and information, or the Web’s communicative power will always be weakened if we can only trust people we already know.

Cyborgs: bodies enhanced, or invaded?

1998-06-01T00:01:00.000+01:00

The limitations of the body are frustrating, as Babbage found when a sore throat consequent upon an attack of influenza left him incapable even of railing at the buskers who congregate outside whenever he takes to his sickbed. Voiceless, he felt in a position similar to that of the unfortunate San Francisco gorilla, Coco, who is to be conscripted into using the Internet in the latest of a tradition of experiments in teaching human language to apes.

Babbage firmly believes that experiments of the Washoe and Nim Chimpsky ilk obscure more than they reveal about language, thought and intelligence. Nevertheless, the mechanics of the situation are relevant to us all, since Coco's access to the Analytical Engine is necessarily indirect: Coco signs manually to a human keyboard operator, who reads aloud the text from the screen. This two-mode approach to duplex communication applies equally to human-Engine interaction, so limited in its efficiency by manual dexterity and the available bandwidth of the Engine's visual and audible replies.

Science fiction has long explored means of improving this communication by direct neural interfacing, or 'cyborging'. In Mr Samuel R Delany's 1968 novel, Nova, a spaceship's crew routinely plug control lines into electronic wrist sockets. Mr DG Compton's 1974 novel, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe features a journalist sending video images from his electronically supplemented eyes; and the "Bionic Woman" of the 1976 television series had multiple prostheses including an amplified electronic ear.

After three decades, such ideas have moved closer to reality. Servomotors in prosthetic limbs may be controlled to some extent by impulses from the remaining motor nerves. A research team under Dr Wentai Liu of the North Carolina State University has prototypes for partial restoration of sight via an electronic 'artificial retina'. And cochlear implants, stimulating sensory nerves, help in some cases of hearing impairment.

The fictional cyborgs are still of varying plausibility. But a University of Tokyo team has already produced a cyborg cockroach, controlled by electrical pulses to its antennae stumps, and cyborgs of a higher order would have obvious industrial value. Direct neural interfacing, too, cannot be far in the future, following last year's Caltech breakthrough in devising the first 'neurochip' of rat neurones grown through a silicon array. It seems that Coco's successors may, before very long, find themselves accessing their Analytical Engines far more intimately than at present.

Engineering the friendly face of data

1998-05-01T00:01:00.000+01:00

At the risk of readers thinking her under the influence of laudanum, Lovelace must admit to recently asking her colleague a strange question: “Are you real, Mr Babbage?” He raised an irascible eyebrow, wrinkling his brow and shifting uneasily. "I'm sorry," he said dryly, "I don't understand. Could you phrase your question in a different way?" Lovelace found the exchange highly disturbing, for Babbage was indeed unreal.

This false Babbage was a prototype ‘human-form software agent’ she saw at a small R&D group concerned with applying Analytical Engines to means of communication with expert systems and databases. The explanation seemed prosaic enough; Babbage’s screen image had been analysed frame-by-frame from hours of video conference recordings. His mannerisms had been identified and related to causal events, so that the Engine could call upon them, with random and subliminal variations, to create a lifelike ‘avatar’ that answered Lovelace’s typed queries. Nevertheless, these facts failed to dispel fully her reaction.

Lovelace tends to scoff at those who invest emotion in Engine constructs, such as the admirers who have proposed marriage to Kyoko Date, the fictitious Japanese cyber-celebrity. This encounter, however, impressed Lovelace with the power of the human face to communicate data, and more.

Analytical Engines have problems understanding faces: despite the existence of a handful of commercial applications, an Alta Vista search on “face recognition” reveals this as a field still very much at the research stage. But to humans, the face is a ready-made information-rich communication device, which our eyes and brains are already tuned to read. From simple beginnings in representing multidimensional data as cartoon ‘Chernoff faces’, such face representations could provide a powerful and intuitive means of communication between scientists and software.

At present, the concept is in its infancy; the false Babbage would not have convinced Lovelace for long. But how long before Engines can completely mimic a person's presence, with any required informative or emotive effect? A friendly face to data is one thing; but might we not also be duped by cybernetic sales staff, engineered to present every visual cue we interpret as trustworthiness? Or be tormented by irate cyber-watchdogs warning us of poor performance? Lovelace is left with a sense of confusion, like the Velveteen Rabbit in Mrs Margery Williams’ classic children’s story, whose first question was “What is real?”

Lateral thoughts both large and small

1998-04-01T00:01:00.000+01:00

It is Babbage’s view that any fact might ultimately be useful, whether it be the heart rate of a pig, the proportion of sexes amongst poultry, or the tabulated causes of breakage of plate glass windows. Trivia, some may think. But a wealth of random knowledge is the basis for serendipity - chance associations that lead to fruitful discoveries - and Babbage was recently musing on the nature of such happy accidents in relation to the Analytical Engine.

The problem-solving power of chance association, whether called "intuition" or "lateral thinking", has been a vital ingredient in our evolutionary success. Its value has been immortalised in mythology, from Herakles’ idea of diverting a river to clean the Augean stables, to the tales of Archimedes’ bath-time “Eureka!” and Isaac Newton’s apple. It is a prime example of a role where the human brain bests the Analytical Engine; yet logically it seems an area in which the Engine could supersede us in seeking unsuspected correlations between facts.

In theory, this needs three components: huge data stores; repeated trial-and-error associations between items; and rapid probability-based assessment of the worth of any trial. These, however, give contradictory requirements of size and speed. For conventional chips, the Moore’s Law model - an annual doubling of manufacturable circuit density - is already running into physical constraints. To achieve the necessary performance, the options are larger devices, or new miniaturisation techniques.

A truly colossal device is already with us: the Internet. But what is waiting to be born is a vast distributed Analytical Engine whose parts spontaneously compare and process data among themselves, just as social animals (humans included) share knowledge and decision-making across their group. Babbage dubs this “metamachine” the Gaia Engine, in whimsical homage to Mr James Lovelock.

At the other extreme, we see the portents of engineering on the microscopic scale of animal nervous systems: for instance, the neurology of the locust’s flight control is well understood as a servomechanism; and Israeli scientists have produced short lengths of silver-plated DNA wire. Who can doubt that logic gates, then large scale integration - the ‘biochips’ of Mr William Gibson’s novels - will follow?

With such developments combined, Babbage's informants predict, we may soon see the day when the Gaia Engine will stir, try out a hunch and intuition or two, then settle down to some truly serendipitous lateral thinking.

Pocket universes and the origins of Creation

1998-03-01T00:01:00.000Z

How little do things change! Mr Babbage was always delighted by ingenious Japanese toy automata; and on Lovelace’ last visit, she found him engrossed with a Tamagotchi, evidently overcoming his earlier fear of electronic swarms. Unable to elicit conversation, Lovelace turned to the radio, where she heard that the Vatican reputedly plans to computerise "the search for God's fingerprints in the chaos of Creation".

What would count as an unequivocal find, given the tendency of our assumptions to obscure the view with our own fingerprints? Even the devoutly religious amongst Lovelace's modern-day friends express doubts at "the feasibility of quantifying God". But all are intensely interested, expecting at least collateral benefits from the exercise.

The premise for the search recalls the 18th century theologian William Paley’s ‘argument from design’: that a complex universe implies a more complex creator. Past searches have tended to fixate on the hardware of Creation, such as the wondrous engineering of the human eye. In Babbage’s time, Darwinism was the reply to Paley, and so it remains today, even extending to Professor Lee Smolin’s elegant theory (see his book The Life of the Cosmos) that the fundamental constants of the universe - seemingly tailored to our existence - may also have evolved Darwinistically.

In the software field, scientists such as Adrian Thompson, at the University of Sussex Centre for Computational Neuroscience, mimic and examine the origins and evolution of intelligence and of life itself. Tom Ray’s celebrated Tierra program, too, has shown that life-like complexity may evolve - a community of hosts, parasites and meta-parasites - in a simple world of competing programs.

Even in the mundane sphere, such ‘pocket universes’ afford their operators God-like powers. Banks and credit card companies watch for fraud by comparing our spending patterns with our model analogues inside their corporate Analytical Engines. The disease transmission vector models of the World Health Organisation and the Disease Control Center in Atlanta help prevent global pandemics, while meteorological bureaux watch for digital signatures of storms to give advance warning. Other Engines monitor virtual aircraft, ships, cars, and even Babbage’s beloved railways, helping guard against disaster.

Whilst creation itself remains beyond our compass, Lovelace feels that, with Engine-enhanced vision, we have started to take responsibility for phenomena which were formerly blamed on ‘acts of God’. Perhaps the Vatican will find not fingerprints but departing footprints.

Automata swarm with good intentions

1998-02-01T00:01:00.000Z

Babbage is often delighted by the way modern technology brings happy reality to ancient dreams. Seeing hang-gliders over the Devon cliffs reminds him of the artificial wings of Daedalus. The vacuum flask, wherein he keeps his tea on railway journeys, recalls the magical bottles of Welsh legend which preserved the heat of any liquid, “though it was carried from the east of the world to the west”. An informant at a Swiss-based food multinational suggests another example on the near horizon, arguing that a ‘swarm’ of small robots could replace large agricultural machinery, labouring like the ants of Greek myth who helped Psyche fulfil the impossible task of sorting a large heap of mixed seeds.

This hopeful vision was echoed by the correspondents who took Babbage to task for his pessimistic picture of distributed automata as a potential monster. Many specialists, to whom Babbage can only defer, have painted instead a bright future of robot swarms in the service of humanity, from exploring the vastness of space to maintenance of the human body (Lovelace’s “molecular universe”).

An acquaintance of Babbage pointed to the contemporary problem of landmine clearance. Could not connected automata, she asked, perform this task more rapidly and safely than humans? Workers at a Scandinavian university quickly dispelled Babbage’s doubts as to the cost: each automaton could further disperse by controlling cheaper, more expendable, ‘drones’ to spread its presence across perhaps a hectare of territory

From an eminent American astronomer came the thought that dispersal could be applied beyond land devices. Flying, seagoing or spaceborne swarms are equally feasible, perhaps with different drone types held as a common resource and assigned to individual ‘queens’ as needed. They could operate in hazardous environments - ocean trenches, volcanic regions or the asteroid belt - taking over roles such as seismic research, disaster relief and mining. Such a swarm could even undertake for us the long journey to other stars. When idle in transit it could disperse to form a vast radio telescope, thousands of miles across: the ultimately flexible research tool.

Babbage finds this flexibility enchanting: an extension of Lovelace’s idea of the Analytical Engine as an absolutely general machine. And with advances such as the PatMax improved machine vision and the University of York’s AURA “reasoning” neural network, both described in November’s issue, these dreamt-of automata come ever closer to reality.

Lightning calculations make fractals practical

1997-12-01T00:01:00.000Z

Lovelace’s memory was jogged by Babbage’s recollection last month of their inventor friend Mr Andrew Crosse. She remembers fondly her visits to his Somerset home, Fyne Court, with its orchards festooned with wires to harness atmospheric electricity: one of the experiments that earned him the epithet ‘Wizard of the Quantocks’. Mr Crosse, she feels, would have approved of the contribution of Analytical Engines to the study of aerial phenomena, from everyday lightning to the ‘sprites’ and ‘jets’ newly observed in the upper atmosphere above thunderstorms.

This subject engaged Lovelace’s mathematical curiosity recently, when she read of the work of Juan Alejandro Valdivia at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; his computed models of the electromagnetic disturbance of lightning bolts assume a conductor with the spiky branching form known as a Diffusion Limited Aggregate fractal.

Ever a devotee of arithmetical beauty, Lovelace admits to a fascination with such engine-generated shapes; indeed, she feels that she is due some recognition for having anticipated fractals. The sight of a program creating the opium-dream arabesques of the Mandelbrot soundly confirms her prediction that the Analytical Engine would weave algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

While Lovelace’s interest in fractals derives largely from aesthetics, she expects that Babbage will find more sympathy with their growing practical use. Until recently, fractal theory was largely directed toward mathematical explanations of natural forms: for instance, tree branches and roots; blood vessel and bronchial networks; geological folds and cracks; or the surface of abraded materials at microscopic level.

Now, however, they are finding application in generating tangible and useful structures. Amalgamated Research Inc. of Idaho, USA, manufactures space-filling fractal conduits, similar in shape to the branches of the cardiovascular system. Designed to minimise turbulence, the many rootlike outlets of such an ‘engineered fractal cascade’ (EFC) can draw or inject fluid simultaneously throughout a mixing vessel.

Another company, Fractal Antenna Systems Inc., is developing a branching ‘Fractenna’(tm) for hand-held telephony or for networks of portable Engines. The details are as yet concealed by commercial considerations, but, its makers tell us, this highly efficient sender and receiver of electrical waves will be no bigger than a small coin, tiny even compared to the conventional wand antennae that would have so amazed Mr Crosse.

The double-edged sword of autonomy

1997-11-01T00:01:00.000Z

Babbage was recently intrigued to read The Man who was Frankenstein, in which Mr Peter Haining argues that Babbage and Lovelace’s mutual friend, the electrical experimenter Mr Andrew Crosse, was Mrs Mary Shelley’s chief inspiration for her fictional scientist. Babbage finds this plausible, remembering well the moral outcry at Crosse’s later and much-disputed creation of insects - Acarus mites - by the action of the voltaic battery.

After 150 years, however, the idea of artificial organisms has become less outrageous. Machines are gaining autonomy: for instance, the remotely controlled vehicle exploring the planet Mars can refuse instructions that might endanger its safety. Babbage envisaged the Analytical Engine as a tool merely for amplifying the powers of human thought, and even Lovelace, with her greater prescience, said it would have “no pretensions whatever to originate anything”. Both are amazed, however, by the progress toward apparently sentient Engines.

In a European military research establishment, Babbage was shown rabbit-sized roving automata, equipped with jointed manipulator arms and electronic ‘eyes’ and ‘ears’. When not under direct control, they randomly patrol their environs to learn its geography. To ensure their own survival, they hide from any large moving object, and seek out electrical sockets to ‘feed’ (Babbage is reminded of Crosse’s ‘Acarids’). The military staff casually mentioned a future capacity for lethal force, tempting Babbage into considering noise-sensing automata as a stern measure against raucous street music.

In the same establishment, staff carry portable Analytical Engines interconnected via a wireless telephony network. Could the small vehicles be similarly linked, Babbage wondered? Yes, he was assured -- very easily. It is not, he feels, a very great leap to imagine a linked ‘swarm’ of such vehicles, comprising, like ants, a greatly flexible, dispersed entity. The loss of a single automaton would not fatally injure the swarm, which could repair itself or even manufacture complete new vehicles. Perhaps such swarms are the future of planetary exploration and much else besides.

Human sentience, it has been argued, derives from manipulative capacity and a critical number of neural connections. How large must a swarm be, Babbage wonders, to provide that critical number? He finds the question fascinating; but with the prospect of automata free to decide to copy themselves or to kill, Mary Shelley’s warning about irresponsible scientific creation carries as much weight today as it did when Babbage, as a young man, first read Frankenstein.

Hidden landscapes revealed in colour

1997-10-01T00:01:00.000+01:00

Lovelace recently had cause to chide Mr Babbage for his failure last month to attribute correctly the phrase "raining floppy disks" to its creator, Mr Richard Dawkins. Babbage claims distraction by a street musician, but Lovelace is more inclined to attribute the lapse to his advancing years.

Inspired to musings on the passage of time, Lovelace was speculating on how differently the great archaeological excavations might have proceeded, had there been access to modern geophysical equipment. At Nimrud, Layard employed dozens of workers in digging trial trenches to trace walls that nowadays could be mapped with a magnetic or resistivity survey. J Turtle Wood took seven years to find the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, following, by intuition and more digging, the temple road buried under 25 feet of alluvium: a situation where now cart-mounted ground penetrating radar (GPR) excels.

However, whilst geophysics provides us a magical eye for seeing into the earth, presentation of its findings is frequently lacking in impact. Lovelace was interested to hear of the Computing Archaeology Research Group at Staffordshire University. Led by Mr Mike Fletcher, the Group uses personal Babbage Engines to interpret and display geophysical data in a fresh and visual form.

One benefit is the Engine's power to explore the relationships between data gathered by different techniques. For example, correlating magnetic and topographic data can distinguish true underground data from that due only to undulations of the terrain. Beyond this, Lovelace found highly appealing the scope of Engines to attractively display archaeological results.

One striking example is the depiction she saw on the Group's World Wide Web page of a resistivity survey of the Hindwell Enclosure, a prehistoric farm site in Clwyd. No dull contour map this, but a three-dimensional model rendered by Engine and green-painted to resemble a field. The domains of low resistivity - the silted hollows of the surrounding ditch, a quarry, and a run-off channel - appear as dips, thus recreating the enclosure as a delightful imaginary landscape.

This is no idle prettifying of numbers. Such techniques, Mr Fletcher argues, aid the appreciation of results by the onlooker, and can only be an improvement when the publication of geophysical findings in archaeology is often still in the 'map and lantern-slide' format of the lectures Mr Babbage found so tedious in his time at Trinity.

From the data of Nature to the nature of data.

1997-09-01T08:01:00.000+01:00

Babbage was impressed, during his recent travels, by the variety of ways in which the descendants of his Difference Engine are now applied to the study of Natural Science. He was particularly intrigued by the intertwining of Computer Science, once a construct whose ideal was Mr Boole's pure symbolic logic, with the more anarchic Life Sciences.

In Proverbs 6:6, the Bible tells us to "go to the ant ... and consider her ways". In Martlesham Heath, England, telecommunications engineers have taken that advice, devising programs that direct telephone calls using ant-like behaviour to seek the best route. Independent software entities - 'agents' - move about the network leaving guiding messages for each other, just as ants leave scent trails to guide others to food.

In Stuttgart, physical chemists use automatic sampling of the statistics on a factory's processes to tune, as it were, the variables controlling the factory. They are, in fact, inducing a machine to mimic the trial-and-improvement patterns whereby an animal solves a problem.

In Paris, the seat of the perfume industry, other chemists link computers to chemical sensors which complement or augment the olfactory discrimination of the human nose. In Moscow, a computer simulation explores the possible futures of an endlessly mutated DNA chain.

The phenomenon is not merely one of learning to copy natural methods. Biologist Mr Stephen Jay Gould has memorably described the cloud of pollen from a tree as "raining floppy disks", and this view of Nature as information (utterly alien to the scientific paradigm of Babbage's day) is reshaping the endeavours of humankind to emulate those of natural creation.

Confused and dazzled by such complexities, Babbage took refuge in observation of humble lichens within an ancient oak wood in the Devon of his boyhood. When, however, one of these enigmatic plants defied recognition, he sought enlightenment in an Antwerp database. In pursuit of the Norwegian Bryoria smithii, it occurred to him that the branching hierarchy of this botanical key replicated the evolutionary and taxonomic classifications it described. And beyond, the global web (the key being but a small part) has itself developed to become like an evolving organism, driven less by its makers than by Mr Darwin's laws.

Such esoteric encapsulations of human data and universal code, Babbage decided, were the territory of Lovelace's more freewheeling intellect, and he resolved to concentrate his mind on comparatively straightforward considerations of engineering and physical reality.

Introducing our new diarists: Babbage and Lovelace.

1997-08-01T08:01:00.001+01:00

Charles Babbage, the British pioneer of computing, died in 1871. His friend and colleague Ada, Countess of Lovelace, had predeceased him by two decades. They may seem unlikely collaborators: Babbage the Cambridge-educated inventor, ultra-rational scientist, and hater of street musicians; Lovelace the aristocrat, talented mathematician, socialite, gambler, and opium addict. After more than a century, some may have forgotten them entirely. And yet their ideas, too little valued in their own day, are now vindicated by that same passage of time and events.

We see the spirit of Babbage’s work in modern scientific computing. Numerical computing reminds us of the role of his unfinished mechanical computer, the Difference Engine, which he devised as an automatic generator of mathematical tables. The multi-purpose PC recalls its planned descendant, the Analytical Engine, a machine for calculations that would be (in Lovelace's words) "absolutely general".

Ada Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron, the poet) has often been remembered as a mere chronicler and populariser to Babbage, but recent years have brought recognition. Her image now is the eponymous "Ada, the enchantress of numbers" in Betty Toole's book (Strawberry Press, California, 1992) and the "Queen of Engines" in Gibson and Sterling's 1990 SF novel "The Difference Engine".

Her scheme for calculating Bernoulli numbers on Babbage Engines qualifies as the first computer program, and in 1979 the US Department of Defence gave her name to a programming language. She even predicted the application of the Analytical Engine to music and graphics, 150 years before the multimedia revolution.

Unfortunately brass construction and steam power (not to mention twin millstones of politics and Babbage’s own procrastination) were not equal to her foresight, and the Analytical Engine happened only with the arrival of electronics.

How would Babbage and Lovelace view the fast-changing world of modern computing? Starting in the next issue of SCW, our diarists will take on their roles and examine through their eyes the impact of computing on science. They welcome readers' thoughts on matters related to scientific computing; and are keen to hear, for possible examination in their column, of novel computing solutions to scientific problems.

Babbage and Lovelace welcome responses to their musings, and suggestions for topics that might interest them. Send comments to either of the authors on the home page.

Communal efforts free scientific minds

1989-09-01T00:01:00.000+01:00

Lovelace was recently reminiscing with her friend Babbage about the early days of their collaboration. “It must be a very pleasant merry sort of thing to have a Fairy in one's service,” she wrote, amused at the thought of Babbage taking his ease in London, while at Ockham Park she hurried to revise and post him the latest explanatory Note on the Analytical Engine.

This seems a most pleasant analogy to the widely-publicized work of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Home (SETI@home) project. Daily the Arecibo radio telescope generates some 35 gigabytes of data, which requires complex Fourier analysis. The inspired idea of the SETI@home organisers at UC Berkeley, USA, was to recruit users of personal Engines throughout the world to help with this immense task. Each user downloads a ‘screen-saver’ that busies itself with analysing blocks of radio data whenever the owner is idle (perhaps, as Lovelace recalls writing of Babbage, “feasting & flirting in luxury” over dinner).

So far, the 600,000 users have together logged 8600 years of processing time: a remarkable achievement! Babbage, as is his wont, lectured Lovelace on spare processor cycles, redundancy, and massively distributed parallelism. Lovelace felt that he was missing a broader observation: SETI@home is a move away from local computing toward wide participation by anyone who is interested. It foresees a society whose very fabric would sustain the processing of scientific information. With such resources, scientists could focus immediately on a project’s intellectual aims, not the hardware investment forced upon anyone who must process data alone. A further effect could be wider scientific literacy and democratic, cooperative science - even an end to novelist CP Snow’s division between the ‘Two Cultures’ of art and science.

At present, this is still a dream. Studying Usenet newsgroups, Lovelace found that talk of SETI@home centred on the technicalities of bandwidth and work-units, sometimes degenerating into frank boasting of Engine speeds. Such competition, it has to be admitted, is central to the unusual success of this project. Its web site publishes league tables, and encourages groups to compete in processing the most data. Lovelace fears that a competitive urge may be inevitable human nature; but SETI@home certainly shines as a model for harnessing this trait toward a communal scientific effort.