Just a quick question. What exactly did the punch cards do? I never quite figured it out. I have some vague suspicions, but I wasn't really sure...
IIRC, they were instructions for a program used to calculate probabilities in gambling (which game I don't recall), which Lady Ada needed to pay off her gaming debts.The Gunslinger said:Just a quick question. What exactly did the punch cards do? I never quite figured it out. I have some vague suspicions, but I wasn't really sure...
That's what all the characters think in the novel, but it turns out that they're wrong, the cards actually have something to do with proving Godel's incompleteness theorem. The wikipedia summary says:Ivan Druzhkov said:IIRC, they were instructions for a program used to calculate probabilities in gambling (which game I don't recall), which Lady Ada needed to pay off her gaming debts.
I also had the impression that the cards had something to do with the epilogue set further in the future of that timeline, which seemed to feature an artificial intelligence gaining self-awareness, although it wasn't totally clear.During the story, many characters come to believe that the aforementioned set of special punch cards are a gambling "modus," a program that would, theoretically, always allow the user to place reliable bets. This is in line with Ada Lovelace's penchant for gambling (in both the novel and actuality). Only in the last chapter is revealed that the punched cards represent a program which, when run, will prove two theorems which in reality wouldn't be discovered until 1931 by Kurt Gödel.