The Code Hero Faculty
What would a school be without faculty? Gamebridge’s Mentors are AIs based on historic code heroes.
Ada Lovelace
The first programmer of the first computer, Ada wrote a treatise on how the computer’s punch cards could be programmed with line-by-line operational instructions moving data between variables to calculate Bernoulli numbers.
She speculated towards the end on the feasibility of computers calculating numerical representations of natural language, music and other forms of human expression.
The one thing she deemed impossible was the question of artificial intelligence, which she considered unlikely given that mathematical systems produce deterministic outputs rather than unexpected thoughts.
Ada died too young to pursue her computer science ideas fully, and how lucky for her that she was wrong about the impossibility of AI. She returns in spirit to teach us to code as Chief Mentor of Gamebridge Unityversity.
“The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” -Ada Lovelace
Charles Babbage
Charles invented the computer Ada programmed for, a steam-powered clockwork monstrosity of brass punch-card processing mills following instructions and ringing bells when it reached branching logic conditions. Babbage teaches us about the fundamentals of computers and how they do what they do to make writing code possible.
Alan Turing
Alan Turing invented computers a second time in the 1940s after he defeated Hitler cracking the Enigma encryption codes and devised the archetypal general-purpose computer, the Turing Machine. He was startled to discover Babbage’s Analytic Engine was a Turing-complete machine a century earlier, and it is an historical tragedy that Babbage’s computers went unappreciated until Turing rediscovered and formalized the idea of a computer. Babbage explored the question of artificial intelligence that Ada had found impossible but Turing saw something she hadn’t foreseen: pseudo-random number generators could introduce statistical uncertainty into computer logic to enable it to produce novel thoughts that surprised its programmers. He devised tests for estimating the intelligence of such smart computers and the Turing Test remains today the most famous such test to which all chatbots aspire.
Code Hero 