Frolicsome Engines: The Long Prehistory of Artificial Intelligence

I thought this was a fantastic article. I've been intrigued for awhile by the interplay between automata, mechanical looms and early computational devices that she writes about here. Great example of how seemingly trivial or toy-like inventions can end up having unforeseen consequences. It's also interesting to think about how the history of magic and the history of technology have been entangled (by the latter I don't mean actual magic of course, but the drive to create objects or phenomena that appear magical).

"Of course, it’s an anachronism to call sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pinned cylinders “programming” devices. To be sure, there is a continuous line of development from these pinned cylinders to the punch cards used in nineteenth-century automatic looms (which automated the weaving of patterned fabrics), to the punch cards used in early computers, to a silicon chip. The designers of the automatic loom used automata and automatic musical instruments as their model; then Charles Babbage — the English mathematician who designed the first mechanical computers during the 1830s, the Analytical and Difference Engines — in turn used the automatic loom as his model. Indeed, one might consider a pinned cylinder to be a sequence of pins and spaces, just as a punch card is a sequence of holes and spaces, or zeroes and ones."

If you are interested in the history of automata, artificial creativity and artificial intelligence, the following two are also interesting.

- D. Summers Stay, Machinamenta: The thousand year quest to build a creative machine.

- W. Zhao, Rendering the Illusion of Life: Art, Science and Politics in Automata from the Central European Princely Collections.