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1770 Mechanical Chess Player Inspired Babbage
dipfan writes "A new book tells the extraordinary true story of a clock-work chess-playing "machine" named The Turk that wowed Europe and the US in the 18th and 19th century, beating Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon, among others. Although it turned out to be a cleverly designed trick, the device is credited with inspiring Charles Babbage (the father of the computer), who played and lost to the automaton in 1820, with the idea that a mechanical engine could be programed to perform tasks... and the rest is computing history, right up to IBM's Deep Blue. There's an article by the author at Wired, and the preface and first chapter of the book The Mechanical Turk available online."
From the first link .. "Kempelen's contraption was, of course, a hoax. It would have been impossible to build a genuine mechanical chess player using 18th-century clockwork technology."
What is sad to me, is that with the progression of 20th-century computers, and digital watches where even an analouge-faced watch is controlled by quartz crystal and battery, it seems as though the *art* of clockwork has been forgotton....
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves? -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
I'm pretty sure I've known of the Turk for years.
I read the Wired article when it came out in print a couple months ago, and I'd have to say I found it quite interesting. It seems to be the Turk was quite a feat in its time, convincing some of the world's most respected scientists that it was indeed a machine, when it was in fact not. It makes me think about today, when there is so much press covering everything, if it would be possible for something such as Deep Blue to be a similar hoax. I know IBM was very secretive about the hardware and coding and what not, so maybe all they did was stick Bobby Fischer inside. That thing sure is big enough to do that...
Thats a really cool little gadget. I wish I could have the skills to build something like that...although it'd prolly be too difficult. Programming chess games is hard enough, and there's no hardware in that...damn algorithims
GOD DAMNIT , MODERATE ME!
some people still make them, but unless you want to force people to pay vastly more for their timepieces the art of the mechanical watch is going to become mroe and more rare.
Photos.
Of course it later turned out that the competing product did not have this feature and in fact nobody had ever done it before.
G.
You gotta be kidding! My old 486 always beats me, and that damned thing is generally slower than a dead rock!
That is an unbelievable karma whore.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
http://web.media.mit.edu/~wsack/CAA/chess-machine. html
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Here's a free ebook on Maelzel's Chess Player, written by Edgar Allan Poe. It looks pretty good.
what's that expression? any sufficiently short midget is indistinguishable from magic!
The end-all be-all of chess was not embodied in any creation by IBM, that's for sure. Computer-chess history did not end with Deep Blue, and is still alive and well on the ICC and freechess. The software that is being developed right now is A LOT better than anything the Deep Blue team ever came up with, and I have a feeling that if IBM hadn't pulled the plug on Deep Blue it would have probably lost its next match. But don't take my word for it, already Chess software is approaching the strength of Deep Blue by using hardware 1/100th as powerful. I'm sure that in 5-10 years the best machines will regularly beat the world champions on normal PCs.
...you must go and see the working model of Babbage's difference engine #2 at the Science Museum. It was completed in 1991 by the staff using Babbage's drawings and worked first time.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
When Professor Campion unveiled Boilerplate in 1893, the concept of a mechanical man was not a new one. Edward S. Ellis, in 1865, wrote about a prodigy that constructed a non-sentient automaton called the Steam Man. At the time, it was considered to be nothing more than an elaborate novelty item, like Boilerplate. Stories of its feats were relegated to the tabloids and "Edisonades." In the account entitled Steam Man of the Prairies (the first of several such publications), Johnny Brainerd, a teenage dwarf, invented "a man that shall go by steam." Here is how it was described: This is a later, cruder version
Doesn't sound like you really know what the hell you're doing.
How is The Turk different than modern chess programs today?
Even the best chess programs (Big Blue, etc.) today require the input of humans. They are given instructions, and apply those instructions in a "brute force" fashion to all data in its parameters. The vast majority of the calculations that a computer is asked to make is pure bullshit.
Human intelligence will always have the distinct advantage of eliminating a lot of worthless calculations.
-----
Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone
Shouldn't that be "nearly always does"?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Very interesting article... however I find it unfortunate that we don't know how he pulled the hoax off. Based on what I know about automata, it may be very possible to build a chess playing machine. However doing this a hundred+ years ago? I doubt it mostly due to the fact that creating the gears and other mechanisms needed required an amazing amount of time, skill and perfection. In fact this is why I heard Babbage's machine didn't work and the project fell through. I believe someone recently (if someone can find a article for this) built babbage's machine using the old blue-prints and it worked. Another thing is, if this is a hoax I wonder who was the playing the chess. The article definitly points out that the machine was very good at what it did. They only mention one case of it being beaten (along with the napoleon incident), which would mean whoever was playing was damn good. If someone was that good, why would they hide behind the guise of a machine and not reap the benefits of being one of the best chess players in the world? Oh well, definitly a good read though.
Oh one more thing, the duck? They mention that it could take food out of a hand... how the hell did it do this? The last time I checked, motion sensors, digital cameras and such hadn't been invented yet. How the hell did the thing see where it was going, and have the ability to interact with a specific location?
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
"The chess player had indeed been controlled by a concealed operator using a clever system of folding partitions to remain hidden while the automaton's interior was open to view."
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
James Randi did a nice write up about this, with some great pictures and commentary about the machine on his site. You can find a direct link to the articles here and here. I especially enjoyed the artwork depicting how the person inside fit in the contraption and enabled it to play chess. This was a very, very clever little hoax!
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"Kempelen's contraption was, of course, a hoax. It would have been impossible to build a genuine mechanical chess player using 18th-century clockwork technology."
Don't sell old technology too short. While a fully playing chess computer was beyond their reach, there were genuine automata in the 18th and early 19th century that could play end-games mechanically. Another examples of amizingly advanced automaton is the Swiss scribe, which can be programed to write a persons name with a quilt in long-hand, including pausing to dip the quilt in the ink well.
That would still be a challenging task for a robotic arm today.
Lastly the entire mechanism that allowed the chessmen to be grasped by a person from inside the Tuks was not replicated until a few decades back, again by "advanced" robotic research.
mechanical computers are very common, you just don't think of them. Every car (well most) have a camshaft. It is a mechanical computer, it controls all actions of an engine. Many other exsamples are out there. It is sad to see the replacement of mechanical devises by electronic ones. Electronics are just to boring. Its no fun staring at a black chip. Staring at a clock working can entertain for hours. Maybe this is why i'm a mechanical engineer. I hope our future isn't a bland world of chips.
Brad
1770... This is news? ;)
So when's someone going to make an automaton that whacks people every time they build a website with a background that makes it totally unreadable?
This is not the only chess playing machine.. There were others, most of them containing a chess playing midget. But then some man got really frustrated when he lost the game and shot the machine with his gun..
Vision recognition is going to eliminate the need for humans to relay the board state, and there are contests in which AIs play games in which they dont know the rules, and must deduce them from the results of their actions.
Also, computer are very good at following orders, unlike humans who have the "distinct advantage" of messing up over time.
(im not trying to sound anti human, i rather like our species, its just theres some things that computers and machines do better then us, like assembly line work, and some things that we do better, like research)
You shouldnt be bashing computers and programs for doing "worthless calculations", thats what we built the things for.
This
Nice history from conception to ash. http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lab/7378/au tomat.htm
here thisone works or take the damn space out of my last post. http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lab/7378/au tomat.htm
"That would still be a challenging task for a robotic arm today"
:)
Not hardly. Mechanically extremely easy, we just have to write the software
This
Shouldn't the first > be a pipe? Heh heh...he said pipe...
A Multi-Gigahertz processor.
1.5 GB of DDR RAM.
Dual 100 GB hard drives.
A half dozen fans to cool the whole thing.
AND I CAN'T FIND A GAME OF OTHELLO / REVERSI THAT CAN CONSISTENTLY BEAT ME.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Imagine a cluster of those
how the fuck is this post modded "interesting"
When the british went to india for the first time, they were amazed by the fact that the natives, who they considered inferior, routinely beat them at chess. Perhaps the inventor had someone from india in the machine, as indians seem to be smaller than europeans (on average), would fit in the machine better, and would probably not compete in chess in europe.
Turing talked a lot about the Babbage Engine in his famous essay "Can Machines Think?" While that fact has very little bearing upon the article, Turing's essay touches upon the meaning of what it means to be human and whether it can be replicated. The Babbage Engine was his way of disproving that electricity is what makes humans human. Effectively it also banished the notion that it is any physical or quantifiable thing that makes humans human.
Maybe Arte Johnson got some mod points?
Those machines were not built just to get rich:
In 1879 Mephisto (Gunsberg) went on tour, defeating every male player. However, when playing ladies, it would obtain a winning position, then lose the game, offering to shake hands afterwards
.. but also to get chicks!
My grandfather was a watchmaker and later a jewler/watch repairman. He showed me a watch one time and said "these new electronic watches keep great time, but they're as much fun to work on."
It seems to me that he agreed with your sentiment, but realized that a better and cheaper product was what people wanted.
That's the same article as the first.
now it's informative as well, oh well it's not like i read the comments to be informed
...that most of the first public appearances of computing technology appear to have been rigged demos?
It seems like some things never change.
We Americans would love to convince ourselves that we, rather Charles Babbage, invented the computer. The British have Allan Turing, and a Postal Inspector for their first computer, or so they like to think. However, the fact is that the first computer was invented by Konrad Zuse (1910-1995) at the age of 28 (1938). Konrad was unfortunately living under a Nazi Dictatorship at the time. Turing was brilliant, and Zuse probably didn't hold a candle to Turing. However, I have to step in and make sure the bogus headline here on Slashdot does not perpetuate the silly myth. Konrad Zuse is the father of computing!
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
We had (at my previous place of employment) a product that let the user manage print job "spool files" on a proprietary commercial operating system (HP 3000 MPE/V). We were already able show the user data going to "open" spoolfiles that were being created, but only up to the point that the last block of records was posted to disk.
The request was to be able to see (in real time) the very latest writes that had been made to the file even though it had not been posted yet. The claim was that the competition did this.
The solution required hunting down the process specific in-memory file buffers for the open spoolfile object and extracting the data from the buffer and polling for new records as the program wrote them (without crashing the machine if the process went away, etc.).
This had to be reverse engineered with no source code for the OS and no help from the OS vendor.
We thought it was a pretty clever hack at the time, more so after finding out that the competitor's program really only displayed the most recently posted full block of data just as our program had done.
G.
black power!!
To quote from your link, he actually invented "first mechanical binary digital computer".
Babbage still remains as the pioneer of programmable computing machines.
A dont forget (one of) the first computer programmers, Ada Lovelace, perhaps the Grandmother of computer programmers.
This seems kind of important dont you think? Ada was fidling around with programming. Surely anyone who wrote down how to do long division was a programmer too! Babbage was a legend, but just like all the people who say their inventions predated Edison, they never actually built them.
How we know is more important than what we know.
If you don't know that it can't be done, then you try and maybe you'll succeed. Just because people think it can't be done doesn't mean that it's impossible to do.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
I notice this thread is filled with rather creative interpretations of the history of computing
First of all, Charles Babbage was very British.
While the Difference Engine wasn't much of a computer (but it was built, not by Babbage in the 1820's, but by Georg and Edvard Scheutz in 1843), the Analytical Engine, designed in 1834, was a punch card programmable mechanical computer with memory and an output printer. The Analytical Engine was never completed, however.
As for Konrad Zuse's "Z" line of computers, they where revolutionary in that they were the first binary computers. The Z3, built in 1943, might be considered the first general purpose computer. The Z3 was a 250 mFLOPS 22-bit computer with 1408 bits of RAM (64 words).
...ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
an almost forgotten programming language
bears his name, because he was the one,
about 1660, to build the first adding
and multiplying machine....Babbage
was surely aware of his work !
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
I'd say the problem is that Americans love to convince themselves
that Charles Babbage was American!
Trying to appear erudite by using the Greek alphabet, the author claims the Greek word for "self" is "autoz". Well he's wrong. It's "autos".
Well it depends on how you define "computer". If you say Mechanical, then the Difference & Analytical engines are the first computers. If you say Electro-Mechanical, then Konrad Zuse wins. If you say Electronic with valves, then thats Turing (Which is debatable, I'll admit). If you say Electronic with transistors, then that the TX-0 & TX-2, which were built for the US Airforce (Or was it Navy? Anyone?).
;)
This doesn't even begin to include smaller adding machines, telephone switching systems and others. Deciding wether a relay is Electronic or Electro Mechanical is contentious as well.
For the record, I'm British, so I count Babbage as the first
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Link: http://www.iwc.ch/collections/collection/complicat ions/gc-en.asp
- Production limited to 50 watches per year
- Mechanical movement
- Self-winding
- Chronograph
- Minute repeater
- Perpetual calendar
- Four-digit year display
- Perpetual moon phase display
- Small seconds with stop function
- 659 parts
- Screw-in crown
- Crown-activated rapid calendar advance
- Convex sapphire glass
- Case diameter 42,2 mm
Quote:
"One of the world's most complex wristwatches gets the energy it needs to display the time automatically from the movements of the arm. The chronograph records times up to twelve hours to an accuracy of one-eighth of a second. The calendar is mechanically programmed for the next 500 years. The minute repeater chimes out the time in hours, quarters and minutes whenever you wish."
If you can read this, thank an english teacher.