#algorithm
The application of the division of labor to computation at such a scale brought new kind of errors – errors that, later on, Charles Babbage and his followers precisely attributed to human computers. Prony's organization produced two specific types of errors: miscalculations, attributed to the fast and repetitive conditions of work, and typographical errors in the table printing process. The calculations were done in a first quick round, handwritten as tables and the work was completed after a few months, in March 1795. To adjust the errors ratio, Prony decided to recompute everything, and all the calculations were reprocessed again, from scratch. The search for errors, using this new version as a comparator, took three years to be completed. In between, the typeset of the still erroneous tables was already undertaken by the publisher, Didot, as typesetting and layout took a long time as such. Only a half of them was completed when money dried up, due to the financial crisis of the assignat and the project ultimately failed.[10] With Bonaparte’s coup d’État, the change from regime to Empire marks the end of Prony’s Bureau du Cadastre in 1802. The publication of the Prony’s logarithmic tables remained unfinished. However, the handwritten manuscripts were preserved at the Paris Astronomical Observatory archives. Since then, they became an important legacy for mechanized computing. Despite this failure, if anything, Prony's manufacture marks the birth of the profession of the human computer.
From 2005 to 2015, with the project Antidatamining,[1] we investigated the growing use of data on the financial markets. By extension, it led us to reverse-engineer the designs of some of the High-Frequency Trading algorithms [HFT]. We inspected the specificities of the technical infrastructures allowing those algorithms to run. Further we researched the causes of some the most iconic algorithmic market crashes – the original Flash Crash (May 6, 2010), the Knightmare (2012), and Hash Crash (2013) and learned about the bizarre folklore of the financial world, from the most eccentric pre-algorithmic signal based trading methods (Bachelier's Brownian movement, Gann's esoterism, Malkiel's darts, etc.) to the computerized hacking practices used to beat the market (Front Running, Quote Stuffing, Momentum Ignition, etc.), passing by the bizarre menagerie of Wall Street animal-traders (blindfolded monkeys, circus cats, turtles, etc.).
Slowly, the gender balance of the computers shifted to be almost exclusively female, as suggested by the short name attributed in 1895 to the Computing Division of Toulouse Observatory, “Bureau des dames”, or by the name given to Harvard Observatory’s computing department in 1876, informally known as ‘Pickering's Harem’.[13] This shift was initially motivated by economic reasons, to save costs, as women were paid half as much as men, but also by deeply rooted misogynistic prejudices, attributing to women the ability to work on small, painstaking, and unimportant tasks.[14] According to Loraine Daston and her research on the women computers of the Greenwich Observatory, the profession became gender-exclusive around 1930.[15] In 1944, a unit of power was even proposed, the ‘Kilogirl’.[16]