Science-y query (another non-trip post)

[swan_tower]

If you're a math-and-science type person, please read this and give me your thoughts.

***

Tonight I thought up a question that really shouldn't wait until after my trip is done, because depending on the answer, I may end up working it into the revision I'm trying to do while I'm here.

Before the question, though, the background: Charles Babbage designed two devices, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine. The former is essentially a calculator, doing polynomial functions; the latter (had it been built) would have been an early computer, capable of being programmed to do several different mathematical jobs.

So imagine you're reading a book set in 1884, and it tells you that faeries got hold of those ideas and built them, But Better -- for values of "better" that involve extrapolating this design in a magical direction. My question to you all is twofold. First, what extrapolations would you consider reasonable, given the parameters? Second, what extrapolations would make you say "Oh please" and put the book down? Example: "It would be cool if it could do calculations using imaginary numbers, but dumb if it could run World of Warcraft." Or whatever. In essence, I want this to be interesting, but I don't want it to be interesting in a way that's totally divorced from the original purpose of the design.

I'm soliticing feedback because this is, among other things, a matter of the boundary between "suspension of disbelief" and "excruciating torture of disbelief." Which varies from person to person, though math-and-science type people are likely to have a much firmer boundary than those who don't know Babbage from Byron. Also, thanks in part to a declining series of math teachers in my education, I no longer have much love for the subject; ergo, if I ask my brain to think about "math magic," it pulls up images of workbooks designed to make third-graders believe math is fun. So I am ill-suited to judging what I can get away with designing. Would it bother you if the faeries' Analytical Engine performed non-numerical calculations of some kind? What if its function was predictive, analyzing a situation to make semi-divinatory, pseudo-statistical descriptions of the future? Would something like that bother you? What wouldn't bother you, that also isn't so mundane that it wouldn't add much to the story? (The other ideas I've come up with so far all fall into that latter camp.)

Feel free to respond however you like -- brainstorm, talk amongst yourselves, go off onto wild digressions about nineteenth-century math. I know some of you have thought about math + magic, so I'd love to hear what you have to say.

Comments

[yaleartificer.livejournal.com]

If you want to stay very true to early computer applications, ballistics, cryptography, and chess-playing were all among the earliest applications of real computers in the 40's and 50's, and the concepts behind all of them would not be out of place in the 19th century. The mechanical Turk, for example, claimed to be a chess-playing automaton.

It would be strange if computers helped faeries predict the future, because one would assume their normal means of doing so does not involve mathematical models at all. It is not clear how the computer would help. Of course, it could simply amuse them to output the data in pseudoscientific format. But the computer would not be doing anything.

Simple programming with if's and loops can achieve a variety of mostly-repetitive tasks. Look to Lego Mindstorms project pages for inspiration, since the default language used to program them is relatively weak, and the projects are often intended for novice programmers.

Math is not the bottleneck; recognizing its engineering applications is. Fourier, for example, was an advisor to Napoleon; it just took a while to realize how useful his transform was to communication. But keep in mind that Shannon's idea of representing information as bits belongs to the 20th century.

[cepetit.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

Aside: I can't agree with the last sentence. The linguistic construct of representing information as bits belongs to the 20th century... but it didn't originate with Shannon, nor in the 20th century. It's not quite explicit in Kasiski's work in the mid-nineteenth century, but it's clearly there as a concept; and it's implicit in the work of the great cryptanalysts of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, particularly when they were breaking nomenclators in languages they did not themselves speak.

Shannon was a great synthesizer; he didn't originate nearly as much as he is credited with originating. And, perhaps, that's the key to understanding the problems with the Engines, too.