“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”
Permalink: Ada Lovelace
About this quote
Lovelace added the Note G to her translation of Menabrea's paper on Babbage's engine, and used it to argue that the machine would manipulate symbols rather than numbers. Her larger claim, that it could compose elaborate music if it could be taught the rules, is the famous one.
Source: Note G, 1843