Why Ada Lovelace is not a good choice to lead Great Britain

[RedCourtJester]

I'm assuming more leaders for Britain will be added in the future? (Churchill, Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth, etc.)

Lizzie can and likely will return, since she is a staple and an easy cash grab.

Ada likely took the place of Victoria this time. Very similar time period and concept (victorian style and industry).

I hope we don't get Churchill or any heads of state post-WW. Recent history is already biased enough without being propped up even more by a pop history game.

 

[Fluffball]

It's not like any of those would be bad choices (well, except for Thatcher, who probably won't stand the test of time). But we're living in the Age of Computers, and we're talking about a figure in a computer game. And because of that, Lovelace is a smart pick--just try a Google image search for "Steampunk Ada Lovelace." Nobody is cosplaying Matilda or Thatcher (thank goodness) these days

Good or bad at least Thatcher had a great impact on the nation and was a leader.

Lovelace just seems to be the latest in a long line of 'the first' to 'invent' computers in some fashion but she has the advantage of being a girl. Not so long ago Turing was the father of computers, Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet and some unknown Greek guy made some 'computer' found at the bottom of the sea in some ship wreck.

Computing/computers is just the evolution of human knowledge over centuries and even millenia with many people 'contributing' to what we have today. Some more than others.

If we want to say ada Lovelace invented programming then she must have also invented time travel as the jacquard loom (the first programable machine) was patented in 1804 when she wasn't even born and was based on a concept thought up nearly 100 years before she was born.

 

[Sprenk]

Sure--and Lovelace was well aware of the "programmable" loom. Thing is, such "programming" (using a punch card to direct the loom to produce a particular design) isn't really computing in the contemporary sense. It's not much different than a Player Piano--an automaton . What Lovelace saw (and Babbage didn't) is that you could use a calculating machine and program it to work via a series of algorithms which could, when strung together, do pretty much anything imaginable (including generating music that didn't just recreate a set program). This concept is quite similar to what Turing proposed nearly a century later when he wrote about a "virtual machine," imagining a series of people with a sheet of paper and just one binary task, strung together in a "program," being capable of generating virtually anything. It's sort of amazing to us today that such a concept was visionary--it's so much taken for granted now--but until almost the mid-twentieth century there were only calculating machines--and "computer" was a term for people who did number-crunching.

I'm sure this is all old hat to you, but the ability to see what you could do with truly programmable calculating engines was visionary. That's one important reason Turing is considered a visionary--and Lovelace had a very similar vision, well before him. But Turing lived in an age that was almost ready to enact the vision of the contemporary computer, while Lovelace could only dream of the concept.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Ada likely took the place of Victoria this time. Very similar time period and concept (victorian style and industry).

I honestly think Age of Steam Victoria was inspired by the fact we were getting Ada Lovelace in Civ 7.

 

[RedCourtJester]

I honestly think Age of Steam Victoria was inspired by the fact we were getting Ada Lovelace in Civ 7.

Lol. I can sort of see that being the case, although in fairness I think several of the personae were stretches to accommodate different civ playstyles more than pointing toward specific leaders (which I think unfortunately carried over into the VII personae).

Does this mean Rough Rider Teddy is pointing toward Wyatt Earp? And Magnificence Catherine was just a stand-in for a half-naked Casanova in a Gnaga mask? I can hope.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Lol. I can sort of see that being the case, although in fairness I think several of the personae were stretches to accommodate different civ playstyles more than pointing toward specific leaders (which I think unfortunately carried over into the VII personae).

I would generally agree. However, Age of Steam Victoria was already production based upon an already production based "Workshop of the World" ability, so I don't think that was an any different playstyle than before.