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| Smart Computing® Encyclopedia |
| Ramon Lull | ||
| Ramon Lull, a Spanish mystic, Catholic missionary, and one of Spain’s greatest poets, devised a logic machine called the Ars Magna. It was more than three centuries after the Ars Magna that it influenced Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz,
inventor of the Step Reckoner mechanical calculator, one of the precursors of modern computing. Lull’s device also achieved notoriety in the 18th century when Jonathan Swift ridiculed the machine in “Gulliver’s Travels.” More
recently, Lull has become regarded as an early thinker in the field of AI (artificial intelligence) because he believed that an individual’s thoughts could be mechanized. He is best remembered for his poetry and contributions to
Catholic theology. Lull’s logic machine consisted of a stack of concentric disks mounted on an axis where they could rotate independently. The disks, made of card stock, wood, or metal, were progressively larger from top to bottom. As many as 16 words or symbols were visible on each disk. By rotating the disks, random statements were generated from the alignment of words. Lull’s most ambitious device held 14 disks. The idea for the machine came to Lull in a mystical vision that appeared to him after a period of fasting and contemplation. It was not unusual in that day before the dawn of scientific observation for scientific advances to be attributed to divine inspiration. He thought of his wheels as divine, and his goal was to use them to prove the truth of the Bible. In reality, Lull may owe what he considered divine inspiration to the influence of mere mortals. While studying Arabic and working as a missionary to convert the Moors to Christianity, he came across a device that Arab astrologers used called the zairja. It used the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet to represent the 28 categories of thought in Arab philosophy. By combining numerical values associated with the letters and categories, new avenues of thought and enlightenment were opened. Lull’s fame as a mystic spread throughout Europe during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. His followers were called Lullists. Centuries later, the German mathematician Leibniz acknowledged the importance of Lull’s logic machine. In “Gulliver’s Travels,” Swift satirizes the machine without naming Lull. In the story, a professor shows Gulliver a huge contraption that generates random sequences of words. Whenever any three or four adjacent words made sense together, they were written down. The professor told Gulliver the machine would let the most ignorant person effortlessly write books in philosophy, poetry, law, mathematics, and theology. Lull was born in 1235 in Palma, in Spain’s Catalan province of Mallorca. Before becoming a missionary and mystic, he was a tutor in the Aragon court of James I. In 1266, Lull had five visions of Christ and renounced his dissolute life to become a missionary. His life ended in the missionary field in 1316. He was stoned to death while trying to convert Muslims to Christianity in North Africa. | ||
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