Introduction

1.1. Charles Babbage (1791-1871)

Creator of the Analytical Engine - the first general-purpose digital computer (1833)
The Analytical Engine was not built until 1943 (in the form of the Harvard Mark I)

1.2. The Analytical Engine

A programmable, mechanical, digital machine
Could carryout any calculation
Could make decisions based upon the results of the previous calculation
Components: input; memory; processor; output

1.3. Ada, Countess of Lovelace(1815-52)

Babbage: the father of computing
Ada: the mother?
Wrote a program for computing the Bernoulli’s sequence on the Analytical Engine -
world’s 1st computer program
Ada: A programming language specifically designed by the US Dept of Defense for
developing military applications was named Ada to honor her contributions towards
computing
A lesson that we all can learn from Babbage’s Life
Charles Babbage had huge difficulties raising money to fund his research
As a last resort, he designed a clever mathematical scheme along with Ada, the Countess
of Lovelace
It was designed to increase their odds while gambling. They bet money on horse races
to raise enough money to support their research experiments
Guess what happened at the end? The lost every penny that they had.
Fast
Bored
Storage
Here is a fact:

In 1997 Deep Blue(It could analyze up to 300 billion chess moves in
three minutes), a supercomputer designed by IBM, beat Gary Kasparov, the World
Chess Champion
That computer was exceptionally fast, did not get tired or bored. It just kept on
analyzing the situation and kept on searching until it found the perfect move from its
list of possible moves …

Goals for Today:

To develop an appreciation about the capabilities of computing
To find about the structure & policies of this course