What were the implications of Babbage’s calculating engine for the new psychology? Describe the contribution of Ada Lovelace to Babbage’s work.
Babbage’s calculating engine could imitate mental abilities of humans. It could perform mathematical functions could also play chess and checker. Babbage proved by his calculating engine that machines could copy or imitate what the human brain could do. After his invention there was no looking back for scientists who claimed that in the near future, machines will have the ability to undertake any operation that a human can do.
Ada Lovelace was a math prodigy, who Babbage called his ‘Enchantress of numbers’. She was the only one who understood the machine’s operation. She had a clear fascination for the machine that Babbage had made, and published a vivid and detailed explanation giving the implications and use of the machine.
She was also the first one to realize that even if a machine can achieve human intelligence, it could not accomplish anything without a command or an instruction. A machine was after all, a man’s invention and only he could program it to do anything new.