Babbage's Personal Life
Babbage's Research & Ideas
Difference & Analytical Engines
Turing
Miscellany
100
December 26, 1791, in London
When and where was Babbage born? [Development of the printing press, literacy ... time of change and enlightenment leading into the 19th century.]
100
Who Babbage blamed for horse riders being thrown from their horses and the breaking of horses' legs
What are hoop-rolling boys? It's a game! Babbage was denounced in debate in Commons in 1864 for "commencing a crusade against the popular game of tip-cat and the trundling of hoops."
100
In Babbage's time, numerical tables were calculated by people called this
What are computers?
100
The test developed by Turing in 1950 still in use today
What is a test for artificial intelligence?
100
The benefit of building the Difference Engine today, according to the TED Talk about Babbage.
What is being able to 'see' and understand how a computer works -- any computer? TED Talk: ["In fact, it was capable of doing everything we do today with computers, only really slowly."] ["When it's built, you'll finally be able to understand how a computer works, because rather than having a tiny chip in front of you, you've got to look at this humongous thing and say, 'Ah, I see the memory operating, I see the CPU operating, I hear it operating. I probably smell it operating.']
200
Babbage's cause of death in 1871.
What is "renal inadequacy, secondary to cystitis." Babbage died a "bitter" man.
200
What Babbage once did at a glass factory
What is counted all of the broken panes of glass and published in 1857 a "Table of the Relative Frequency of the Causes of Breakage of Plate Glass Windows." [Of 464 broken panes, 14 were caused by "drunken men, women or boys".]
200
With a "store" and a "mill" used in the Analytical Engine, Babbage had designed what modern computers have as these two things
What is "memory" and "processor"?
200
The kind of work Turing was most noted for (hint: a kind of scientist)
What is a computer scientist? [He also studied physics, read Einstein’s theory of relativity as a teenager, and dabbled in quantum mechanics, a new field at the time, as well as biology, chemistry and neurology after the war. "Much of this work was related to creating machines that could learn and 'think', but some of it came out of simple curiosity about the world."]
200
Turing's speech impediment
What is a stutter?
300
Babbage's attitude towards common people or "The Mob."
What is distaste or disgust? People reacted in kind. According to another source: "When Babbage went out, children followed and cursed him. Adults followed, too, but at a distance. Over a hundred people once skulked behind him before he could find a constable to disperse them. Dead cats and other 'offensive materials' were thrown at his house. Windows were broken. A man told him, 'You deserve to have your house burnt up, and yourself in it, and I will do it for you, you old villain'."
300
The society formed by Babbage, John Herschel, George Peacock, and several other friends in 1812
What is the Analytical Society?
300
The Analytical Engine was to be the world's first one of these
What is programmable computer?
300
The work that Turing did during World War II at Bletchley Park
What is being a code-breaker of the German ciphers? [Turing was considered a genius ... "famous as 'Prof', shabby, nail-bitten, tie-less, sometimes halting in speech and awkward of manner, the source of many hilarious anecdotes about bicycles, gas masks, and the Home Guard; the foe of charlatans and status-seekers, relentless in long shift work with his colleagues, mostly of student age."]
300
The ability of a computer to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings.
What is artificial intelligence? ["The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience."]
400
The city in which Babbage's posthumous brain resides.
What is London? Half of Babbage's brain is preserved at the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons, and the other half is on display in the Science Museum.
400
An impressive mathematician and one of the few people who understood Babbage ... the first computer programmer.
What is Ada Lovelace? Lord Byron's daughter, Countess of Lovelace, Babbage's confident and cohort who wrote: "We may most aptly say that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves."
400
The year that Babbage built a functioning Analytical Engine
What is never? The technology didn't exist yet. And ... "Driven by steam, the Analytical Engine would have been roughly the size of a train engine, comprised of an incredibly complex intermeshing of thousands of clockwork parts - the smallest imballance in any of which would have caused the machine, at the very best, to shake itself to pieces." (Redshaw)
400
2 hours, 46 minutes, 3 seconds
What is how long took Turing to run the Loughborough Marathon, to finish in 4th place?
400
The Analytical Engine was programmed by these things
What are punch cards?
500
Babbage had a pathological disgust of these
What are organ grinders? "It is difficult to estimate the misery inflicted upon thousands of persons, and the absolute pecuniary penalty imposed upon multitudes of intellectual workers by the loss of their time, destroyed by organ-grinders and other similar nuisances."
500
The activity that Babbage's obsession with fire culminated in.
He once baked himself in an oven at 265°F (130°C) for four minutes "without any great discomfort" to "see what would happen." [He notes in his 1864 autobiography that he attempted to "summon the devil and document his existence experimentally" at a young age. Throughout his life, he tended to take an experimental approach to religion, but believed that it wasn't entirely incompatible with scientific method.]
500
The dimensions of the first Difference Machine (# of parts, weight, and height).
What is 25,000 parts, 15 tons, and 8 feet tall?
500
An abstract machine that uses symbols on a strip of tape according to a set of rules
What is the Turing machine? ["the granddaddy of the modern stored program computer" ... "the concept of the Turing machine has become the foundation of the modern theory of computation and computability"]
500
What strawberries have to do with anything
Turing "might ask you, in his rather high-pitched voice, whether you think a computer could ever enjoy strawberries and cream or could make you fall in love with it."
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