Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
be more than his total estimate for the cost of developing his new idea,
the Analytical Engine, which he believed would be able to perform var-
ious tasks that normally require human thought, such as playing games
of skill, including Checkers, Tic-Tac-Toe and Chess. But to his dismay
Babbage was unable to obtain further funding from the state, partly be-
cause his failure to complete the Difference Engine had badly dented his
credibility. As a result the Analytical Engine remained on his drawing
board until his dying day.
Babbage planned that the Analytical Engine would be able to reason
with abstract concepts and not just with numbers. Together with his
collaborator, Lady Ada Lovelace,
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Babbage realized that a mechanical
device (or “engine”, as he called it) could manipulate the symbols of a
mathematical formula. Its mechanism could embody the rules for logic
or calculus and output the results.
Babbage considered the possibility of programming Chess and recog-
nized that a Chess automaton would require a basic framework of rules
and objectives to define its actions or moves. Babbage theorized a general
set of guidelines based on several conditional statements of the form
if
this condition is true. . .
then
Such statements are commonplace in the programming languages of the
electronic computer age.
The conditional statements Babbage had in mind for a Chess ma-
chine included
1. Does the current state of the game agree with the rules?
2. If yes, then has the automaton lost?
3. If not, then has the automaton won?
4. If not, can the automaton win with the next move? If yes, make
that move.
5. If not, can the opponent win with the next move?
6. If yes, stop the opponent from winning.
4
Lady Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron and the person after whom the Ada program-
ming language is named.
