One set of rotating wheels and combinations of the Ars Magna of Ramon Llull. (From Illuminati sacre pagine p. fessoris amplissimi magistri Raymundi Lull, 1517.)

c. 1305

RAMON LLULL’S ARS MAGNA

“The quest for artificial intelligence (AI) begins with dreams—as all quests do,” writes computer scientist Nils Nilsson. “People have long imagined machines with human abilities—automata that move and devices that reason.” One of the earliest devices in the history of AI is the Lullian Circle. In his book Ars Magna (The Great Art, c. 1305), Catalan philosopher Ramon Llull (c. 1232–c. 1315) included a paper construction of rotating concentric circles with letters and words written along their circumference. Much like a mechanical lock, the characters and words could be lined up in novel combinations, but in this case the combinations generated a fountain of new ideas and logical explorations. Author Martin Gardner writes: “It was the earliest attempt in the history of formal logic to employ geometrical diagrams for the purpose of discovering nonmathematical truths, and the first attempt to use a mechanical device—a primitive logic machine—to facilitate the operation of a logic system.”

Llull’s devices for combinatorial creativity provided an early method of using “logical means to produce knowledge,” writes author Georgi Dalakov. “Llull demonstrated in an extremely elementary, but nevertheless workable, way that human thought can be described and even imitated by a device. This was a small step towards the thinking machine.” Let us imagine Llull, sitting at a table by candlelight, turning his disks to combine words. He believed, according to author Krystina Madej, “a higher knowledge would be revealed and would provide logical answers to questions about religion and creation. . . . [He wanted] to investigate truths and produce new proofs through these combinatory devices.”

The research on formal logic by German polymath and calculus co-founder Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), as well as his invention of the “stepped reckoner,” was stimulated by Llull’s work. As data researcher and professor Jonathan Gray writes: “The initial trickles of Llull’s and Leibniz’s arcane combinatorial fantasies have gradually given way to ubiquitous computational technologies, practices, and ideals which are interwoven into the fabric of our worlds—the broader consequences of which are still unfolding around us . . . regardless of whether or not the machines operate in the ways that we imagine.”