Computers and science fiction – an essay - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 352

was successfully constructed in the early nineteenth century ( Fig. 17.24 ). With
the subsequent development of his programmable Analytical Engine, Victorian
Britain sees the rise of science accompanied by the rise of the new profession
of “clacking” - the programmers who manage and tend the vast Engines of
Government.

Behind the glass loomed a vast hall of towering Engines - so many that at
first Mallory thought the walls must surely be lined with mirrors, like a fancy
ballroom. It was like some carnival deception, meant to trick the eye - the
giant identical Engines, clock-like constructions of intricately interlocking
brass, big as rail-cars set on end, each on its foot-thick padded blocks. The
white-washed ceiling, thirty feet overhead, was alive with spinning pulley-
belts, the lesser gears drawing power from tremendous spoked flywheels on
socketed iron columns. White-coated clackers, dwarfed by their machines,
paced the spotless aisles. Their hair was swaddled in wrinkled white berets,
their mouths and noses hidden behind squares of white gauze. 30

Fig. 17.25. The movie poster for Ender's
Game . A movie version of Orson Scott
Card's classic science fiction novel was
released in 2013.

This is the “Eye” that enables the government to make queries using data on
punched cards and follow all the transactions of individuals. Searching the gov-
ernment database costs time and money but new forms of bribery and corrup-
tion have inevitably developed.

Every spinning run is registered, and each request must have a sponsor. What
we did today is done in Mr Wakefield's name, so there'll be no trouble in that.
But your friend would have to forge some sponsor's name, and run the risk
of that imposture. It is fraud, sir. An Engine-fraud, like credit-fraud or stock-
fraud, and punished just the same, when it's found out. 31

The story is complicated. It ends with Lady Ada Byron, the “Queen of Engines,”
talking in Paris about Gödel's theorem and the Halting Problem long before
Gödel and Turing existed in our reality. She is giving a lecture on how the Modus
Programme - “a gambling-system, a secret trick of mathematical Enginery” 32 -
brought the French Government's huge Grand Napoleon Engine to a standstill:

And yet the execution of the so-called Modus Programme demonstrated that
any formal system must be both incomplete and unable to establish
its own consistency . There is no finite mathematical way to express the
property of truth. The transfinite nature of the Byron conjectures were the
ruination of the Grand Napoleon; the Modus Programme initiated a series
of nested loops, which, though difficult to establish, were yet more difficult
to extinguish. The programme ran, yet rendered the machine useless! It was
indeed a painful lesson in the halting abilities of even our finest ordinateurs. 33

In the novel Ada adds that Babbage had become “impatient with the limits of
steam power” 34 and was trying to build an electrical power system using resis-
tors and capacitors.

Fig. 17.26. The Last Starfighter featured a
teenage video game player from a trailer
park saving the galaxy. This is a photo-
graph of the console of the Starfighter
arcade game.

Space wars and virtual reality
In the space wars category of science fiction, Orson Scott Card published a short
story called “Ender's Game” in 1977 and later developed this into a novel, and
later still, a whole series of novels ( Fig. 17.25 ). In Card's story, an insect-like race