The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with.
Comment on Babbage's engines
From 'Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esq.' [by I. F. Menabrea with notes by Ada Lovelace], Scientific Memoirs, 1843
