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."

Comments

A picture of the machine:

[Chagrin]

http://web.media.mit.edu/~wsack/CAA/chess-machine. html

Ebook heads-up

[joebp]

Here's a free ebook on Maelzel's Chess Player, written by Edgar Allan Poe. It looks pretty good.

If you ever get across to London...

[mav[LAG]]

...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.

Some extra pictures to illustrate the story

[afflatus_com]

An excellent story, but a little bereft of graphics. Here are some extra pictures to flush out the idea of the device:

• A photo of reconstruction of the device
  
• An exhibition photo
  
• Sketch of the device with open doors
  

Another story about this

[neolith]

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!