Name: The Computer and Turing: Crash Course History of Science #36
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T03:25:36.000Z
Duration: 11 min 54 s
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The history of computer science is heckin' cool.

It features the upending of basic questions, like—what is information?

Adverbs of manner

It has biographical oomph—only this story's war-hero scientist, Alan Turing, was punished,

not celebrated, after helping the Allies win World War Two.

And the history of computer science raises profound questions about technology and society,

like—how do we know that our big complex beautiful brains aren't really just big

And, if we can one day build machines that think as fast as humans, will we have to grant

Questions about thinking machines are relatively recent in history.

But all kinds of doing machines are not, and some of this doing involves solving mathematical

Some time before 60 BCE, the Greeks constructed an analog computer now called the Antikythera

Using many gears, the mechanism may have been used to predict eclipses or other astronomical

But the mechanism appears to have been a one-off.

So historians often give credit for the first mechanical computer to the Artuqid-Turkmen

engineer, Al-Jazarī, who died in CE 1206.

We met him way back in episode seven when dude built a robotic musical band.

And Al-Jazarī built an astronomical clock that showed the signs of the zodiac and could

be reprogrammed to compensate for changing lengths of the day.

Then, in 1642, French mathematician Blaise Pascal invented a mechanical adding machine

that used a collection of rotating numbered wheels, similar to a car's odometer.

Our friend from episode seventeen, German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, built commercial

mechanical calculators in the late 1600s.

And in 1801, in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, French merchant Joseph Marie Jacquard

incorporated the punch card into a textile loom to control patterns—arguably the first

But devices like calculators and looms are pretty far from the computers we rely on today.

So then the question becomes, like... what is a computer?

Well, that word has changed a lot over the years.

In fact, up until the 1950s, a “computer” was a person who computes—usually a woman.

The basic idea today is that a “computer” is a machine that can be programmed to perform

logical tasks—like math problems—automatically.

For many historians, the dream of a somewhat recognizable modern computer that can be programmed

to perform all sorts of calculations without continuous human number-punching, dates back

That's when British mathematician Charles Babbage fully conceived a digital, programmable—but

mechanical—computer called the difference engine.

This was a general purpose information processor: it wasn't just for a single task, but for

Sadly, the difference engine was never completed.

Babbage started working on it, but never finished due to cost overruns and fights with his machinist.

But we have his notes and those of his chronicler, British mathematician Ada Lovelace, who wrote

the first algorithm intended for processing using a computer—basically, the first computer

Fun fact, Lovelace was the daughter of Romantic poet Lord Byron!

Another early computer was actually made and put into use in the United States.

A young mathematician–inventor named Herman Hollerith combined the old technology of punch

cards with the new technology of electrical circuits to produce a sorting and tabulating

With his machine, the 1890 census was finished in weeks instead of years.

Hollerith went on to found the Tabulating Machine Company.

And it's still in business today—as the International Business Machines Corporation,

But neither Babbage and Lovelace's way-ahead-of-their-time designs nor Hollerith's super-sorter established

Some important developments happened in the years before World War Two.

For example, starting in the late 1920s, influential American engineer Vannevar Bush created an

analog computer called a differential analyzer, which could solve calculus problems with as

But the war shoved computer science into the scientific limelight.

In the 1930s, British mathematician, linguist, cryptographer, philosopher, and all-around

smarty pants Alan Turing laid the foundation for a mathematical science of computing.

Turing proposed the aptly named Turing machine—a thought experiment to figure out the limitations

A Turing machine can theoretically perform an algorithm, or programmed operation.

Turing couldn't make an abstract perfect computer, but he could lay out how the logic

of writing and reading programs should work, and how a relatively simple device could,

given enough memory, accomplish any logical operation.

During the war, Turing went to work in the super-secret “Ultra” program at Bletchley

Park, which was an estate for British codebreakers.

Turing wasn't the only computer innovator at Bletchley.

For one thing, eight thousand women worked there!

Also, an engineer named Tommy Flowers designed some for-the-time hyper-advanced computers

called the Colossus series, which also helped the Allies a lot.

But Turing's job, leading Ultra Hut Number Eight, was to decipher encrypted messages

The Germans used a device called an Enigma machine to create supposedly unbreakable ciphers,

or ways of encoding messages so that only someone with the same cipher could read the

But Turing broke through, using a computer he built called the bombe, based on a Polish

These wartime computers weren't super fast or sophisticated.

They were smart ways of automating a lot of dumb tasks.

After the war, Turing kept working on computers.

His 1948 essay “Intelligent Machinery” gave more details on the Turing machine.

Then, in 1950, he published “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in the journal Mind.

Basically, this article became foundational text in artificial intelligence or AI.

Turing famously stated that the appearance of intelligence is proof of it.

Turing arrived at this idea by thinking about a limit case: consider a computer that appears