Jevons's famous contemporaries Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace belong to this calculating tradition too. All of this collective human and machine labor aimed at executing complicated calculations with ever greater accuracy and efficiency. The first electronic computers did not so much replace these workers as modify and rearrange the work they were hired to perform. Indeed the name “electronic computer” was first a way of distinguishing a machine from the usual kind of computer: a clerical worker, frequently female, who performed tedious and complex calculations in the service of some large, bureaucratically organized scientific project. But perhaps what links this device most profoundly with today's computers is, ironically, the fact that it was not about computing.Ĭomputers as we know them descend from machines dreamt up and built for the sake of literal-which is to say, rather, numerical-computation. As a box with a keyboard that mechanically spits out solutions to problems input by a user, the Logical Piano readily evokes an embryonic idea of the digital computer when viewed with modern eyes. Illustrated here in the frontispiece to Principles of Science, and held today in the History of Science Museum in Oxford, the machine represented to Jevons “a conspicuous proof of the generality and power” of his logical method. Jevons’s Logical Machine, as illustrated in his Principles of Science, from the CHM collection. The logic piano is currently in the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. In the task of narrowing down the answer, Jevons identified it with the induction process or "inverse problem." But he did not provide the mechanical method for executing such reductions. But it does not perform the additional step of analyzing those lines and showing the solution or conclusion sought.
But the main objection to the machine (as to the method of its creator) is that the logical plane does not offer a solution, but instead gives all the rows that are consistent (not contradictory) in the column of the logical alphabet. Finally, the machine can work with a very small number of terms.
Added to all this is the fact that there is no efficient procedure for transcribing particular propositions (= some) into the machine. Jevons considered that his machine, while not of practical use, was didactically valuable in demonstrating the nature of logical analysis, and it also provided convincing proof of the superiority of Boolean over Aristotelian logic but the methodological requirement of transcribing propositions in the form of equations it made it unnecessarily complicated.
LOGICAL PIANO SERIES
The output was of the same nature, and the results could be read off a series of gauges on its faceplate. This predecessor of modern computers consisted of a series of gears and levers inside it and, unlike the calculators of the time, used logical propositions instead of numbers as input to make syllogisms.
LOGICAL PIANO FULL
The other five are: for equality (in the center) for the full stop, for the full stop and two non - exclusive disjunction (the conjunction is unsigned The keyboard consisted of 21 keys: eight of them with letters from the center to the left and another eight to the right. On the front of the piano were placed the letters representing the 16 possible combinations of four terms and their corresponding negations. The logic piano used a four-term alphabet to solve a complex logic problem in less time than the human brain.
" He worked in detail on its various applications including the logic piano, a mechanical computer that he designed and built in 1869. He expressed the rationale in its simplest form as follows: " What is true of a thing is true as it is. In 1866, what he regarded as the great universal principle of all reasoning dawned upon him and in 1869 he published an outline of that doctrine, under the title " The Substitution of Similars " (The Substitution of Similars). In the immediate years afterward, he devoted special attention to the construction of a logic machine, exhibited before the Royal Society in 1870, by which the conclusion derivable from any given set of premises could be obtained mechanically. In 1864, he published a small volume entitled " Pure Logic " (Pure Logic) He also published his book " Logic of Quality apart from Quantity " (Logic quality besides quantity) that was based on the logical system of Boole, but freed from what he considered false mathematical dress that system. Jevons' work in the field of logic was in pari passu with his work in economic policy.
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