George Duke wrote on Thu, Mar 6, 2008 10:13 PM UTC:
From Standage 'The Turk' 2002: ''Played with the automaton,'' wrote
Babbage, ''He gave Pawn and the move. Automaton won in about an
hour.'' Visiting Pierre-Simon Laplace, Babbage saw for the first time
the mathematical tables computed by hand under Gaspard de Prony. Later in
1821 Babbage, comparing with friend John Herschel, two
independently-calculated astronomical tables exclaimed, ''I wish to God
these calculations could be executed by steam.'' ''He decided to
act,'' says Standage, sketching out how calculating machine might
work. Hence, the genesis of Babbage's first mechanical computer, the
Difference Engine. More complex Analytic Engine, to rely on punch cards,
copying method of Joseph Jaquard (whose loom used cards for weaving
patterns), was according to Standage ''inarguably the earliest ancestor
of the modern digital computer: It had direct mechanical equivalents of a
modern computer's processor and memory. Babbage even devised a symbolic
notation with which to write programs for it.''
Questioning whether the Turk was pure machine, ''Babbage started to
wonder whether genuine Chess-playing machine could, in fact, be
built.''
