Notes to the Sketch of the Analytical Engine

Passage 1

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with.

Tools and agents Cognition, attention, and judgment limited servant · advances calculation is insufficient · advances Logic, language, and formal reasoning Meaning, experience, and interpretation No judgment offered Individual Machine or artificial system Mind and body

Lovelace distinguishes following a supplied analysis from originating or anticipating an analytical relation, assigning the Engine an executive rather than inventive role.

Note G, conclusion on the Analytical Engine’s powers

Passage 2

This it is calculated to effect primarily and chiefly of course, through its executive faculties; but it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself in another manner. For, in so distributing and combining the truths and the formulæ of analysis, that they may become most easily and rapidly amenable to the mechanical combinations of the engine, the relations and the nature of many subjects in that science are necessarily thrown into new lights, and more profoundly investigated. This is a decidedly indirect, and a somewhat speculative, consequence of such an invention. It is however pretty evident, on general principles, that in devising for Mathematical truths a new form in which to record and throw themselves out for actual use, views are likely to be induced, which should again react on the more theoretical phase of the subject.

Cognition, attention, and judgment Tools and agents selection and judgment · considers instrument · advances Logic, language, and formal reasoning Meaning, experience, and interpretation Conditional or mixed Individual Institutional Machine or artificial system Mind and body

Lovelace separately allows that arranging knowledge for mechanical execution can alter human inquiry: the engine remains an instrument, while its use may disclose new relations to human investigators.

Note G, indirect effects of the Analytical Engine on mathematical inquiry

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