Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers

While Alan Turing is regarded by many as the grandfather of Artificial Intelligence, George Boole should be entitled to some claim to that epithet too. His Investigation of the Laws of Thought is nothing other than a systematisation of “those universal laws of thought which are the basis of all reasoning”. The regularisation of logic and probability into an algebraic form renders them amenable to the sort of computing that Turing was later to show could be just as well performed mechanically or electronically as with pencil and paper.

But when did people start talking about the logic of binary operations in computers as being due to Boole? Turing appears never to have mentioned his name: although he certainly did talk about the benefits of implementing a computer’s memory as a collection of 0s and 1s, and describe operations thereon, he did not call them Boolean or reference Boole.

In the ACM digital library, Symbolic synthesis of digital computers from 1952 is the earliest use of the word “Boolean”. Irving S. Reed describes a computer as “a Boolean machine” and “an automatic operational filing system” in its abstract. He cites his own technical report from 1951:

Equations (1.33) and (1.35) show that the simple Boolean system, given in (1.34) may be analysed physically by a machine consisting of N clocked flip flops for the dependent variables and suitable physical devices for producing the sum and product of the various variables. Such a machine will be called the simple Boolean machine.

The best examples of simple Boolean machines known to this author are the Maddidas and (or) universal computers being built or considered by Computer Research Corporation, Northrop Aircraft Inc, Hughes Aircraft, Cal. Tech., and others. It is this author’s belief that all the electronic and digital relay computers in existence today may be interpreted as simple Boolean machines if the various elements of these machines are regarded in an appropriate manner, but this has yet to be proved.

So at least in the USA, the correlation between digital computing and Boolean logic was being explored almost as soon as the computer was invented. Though not universally: the book “The Origins of Digital Computers” edited by Brian Randell, with articles from Charles Babbage, Grace Hopper, John Mauchly, and others, doesn’t mention Boole at all. Neither does Von Neumann’s famous “first draft” report on the EDVAC.

So, second question. Why do programmers spell Boole bool? Who first decided that five characters was too many, and that four was just right?

Some early programming languages, like Lisp, don’t have a logical data type at all. Lisp uses the empty list to mean “false” and anything else to mean true. Snobol is weird (he said, surprising nobody). It also doesn’t have a logical type, conditional execution being predicated on whether an operation signals failure. So the “less than” function can return the empty string if a<b, or it can fail.

Fortran has a LOGICAL type, logically. COBOL, being designed to be illogical wherever Fortran is logical, has a level 88 data type. Simula, Algol and Pascal use the word ‘boolean’, modulo capitalisation.

ML definitely has a bool type, but did it always? I can’t see whether it was introduced in Standard ML (1980s-1990), or earlier (1973+). Nonetheless, it does appear that ML is the source of misspelled Booles.

We were promised a bicycle for our minds. What we got was more like a highly-efficient, privately run mass transit tunnel. It takes us where it’s going, assuming we pay the owner. Want to go somewhere else? Tough. Can’t afford to take part? Tough.

Bicycles have a complicated place in society. Right outside this building is one of London’s cycle superhighways, designed to make it easier and safer to cycle across London. However, as Amsterdam found, you also need to change the people if you want to make cycling safer.

Changing the people is, perhaps, where the wheels fell off the computing bicycle. Imagine that you have some lofty goal, say, to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Then you discover how expensive that is. Then you discover that people will pay you to tell people that their information is more universally accessible and useful than some other information. Then you discover that if you just quickly give people information that’s engaging, rather than accessible and useful, they come back for more. Then you discover that the people who were paying you will pay you to tell people that their information is more engaging.

Then you don’t have a bicycle for the mind any more, you have a hyperloop for the mind. And that’s depressing. But where there’s a problem, there’s an opportunity: you can also buy your mindfulness meditation directly from your mind-hyperloop, with of course a suitable share of the subscription fee going straight to the platform vendor. No point using a computer to fix a problem if a trillion-dollar multinational isn’t going to profit (and of course transmit, collect, maintain, process, and use all associated information, including passing it to their subsidiaries and service partners) from it!

It’s commonplace for people to look backward at this point. The “bicycle for our minds” quote comes from 1990, so maybe we need to recapture some of the computing magic from 1990? Maybe. What’s more important is that we accept that “forward” doesn’t necessarily mean continuing in the direction we took to get to here. There are those who say that denying the rights of surveillance capitalists and other trillion-dollar multinationals to their (pie minus tiny slice that trickles down to us) is modern-day Luddism.

It’s a better analogy than they realise. Luddites, and contemporary protestors, were not anti-technology. Many were technologists, skilled machine workers at the forefront of the industrial revolution. What they protested against was the use of machines to circumvent labour laws and to produce low-quality goods that were not reflective of their crafts. The gig economies, zero-hours contracts, and engagement drivers of their day.

We don’t need to recall the heyday of the microcomputer: they really were devices of limited capability that gave a limited share of the population an insight into what computers could do, one day, if they were highly willing to work at it. Penny farthings for middle-class minds, maybe. But we do need to say hold on, these machines are being used to circumvent labour laws, or democracy, or individual expression, or human intellect, and we can put the machinery to better use. Don’t smash the machines, smash the systems that made the machines.