History of Automation Pt. II - Encoding and Communication:

"Voyage to Laputa" in Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)

Automatic mechanical writing

The chess-playing "mechanical Turk" (1780s)

AI-human communication

Player-piano-style automatic organ (1650)

Encoding music

Jaquet-Droz's "draughtsman" and

"musician" automata (1780s), Michal's talking heads (1778), with artificial voiceboxes, capable of

intoning "They contained "artificial glottises arranged over taut membranes", capable of intoning "The King gives Peace to Europe" and "Peace crowns the King with Glory"

Artificial speech, writing and music in Enlightenment France

The Jacquard silk loom (1803)

Machine language and communicating in code

What are the goals of thinking like a computer - encoding and abstracting?

- Identify and compare different levels of abstraction (for us, computers), including articulating what is lost and gained in moving between levels.

- Practice encoding phenomena in qualitative form

- Explore how quantitative encoding can increase our power to mechanically manipulate or transform data through arithmetical operation

- Reflect critically on possible strategies for achieving qualitative goals by quantitive/computational means