[SIGCIS-Members] Babbage's Language of Thought

Brian Randell brian.randell at newcastle.ac.uk
Fri Dec 12 07:38:15 PST 2014


Hi Al:

On 12 Dec 2014, at 15:15, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:

> On 12/11/14 2:34 AM, Brian Randell wrote:
> 
>>> I believe that the answer lies in the techniques Babbage developed to reason about complex systems. The Leverhulme Trust have recently made a major award to myself and my collaborator Prof Elizabeth Scott which we will use to document, formalise and implement simulators for Babbage's Notation. The team also includes Plan 28’s Dr Doron Swade, who is the foremost authority on Babbage, and Dr Piers Plummer who has an extensive background in chip design, computer architecture, mechanical CAD and programming language compiler design. The work will be based in Royal Holloway's Centre for Software Language Engineering.
>> <snip>
>> 
>> Full article at http://blog.plan28.org/2014/11/babbages-language-of-thought.html
>> 
> 
> How will this differ from Bromley's work?

My guess is that this project is exactly the sort of project that Allan Bromley would have gone on to do if he had not died so tragically young. But as I recall it Bromley mainly studied Babbage’s drawings (to great effect) rather than his Mechanical Notation - and my impression is that Johnstone’s project has already gone way beyond anything I know of by Bromley.

Cheers

Brian

School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU
EMAIL = Brian.Randell at ncl.ac.uk   PHONE = +44 191 208 7923
URL = http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/staff/profile/brian.randell





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