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

gain computers, lose clockwork

[sniepre]

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....

Just knowing it's possible (even when it isn't)

[Gavin Scott]

We once had a customer ask for a software feature that looked virtually impossible to implement, but the customer claimed that our competitor's product had the feature and that they would buy our product if we added this feature to it. So we figured it couldn't be that hard then, and we managed to add the feature with a couple days effort.

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.

Re:Just knowing it's possible (even when it isn't)

[sunhou]

That reminds me of a science fiction story I read as a kid. A team of two humans was competing with a team of two aliens, to see which team was better at inventing stuff, or rather reproducing an invention from the other's culture.

The aliens gave the humans a perpetual motion machine as the device that they had to reproduce. Of course the humans figured it was impossible, it must be a hoax, etc. Eventually they decided it was real, and so they set out and invented one themselves.

(At the end, the aliens revealed that in fact theirs *was* a hoax. The humans had given a fake anti-gravity machine to the aliens, but the alien team couldn't reproduce it, and to avoid diplomatic problems, etc., the human team finally decided they had to invent an actual anti-grav device as well in order to get out of their predicament.)

It was an enjoyable little story, at least when I read it as a kid.

Re:I read the Wired article

[dipfan]

The book's just been published here in the UK, and the weekend's papers have got reviews - including one that makes the same point (sort of) about Deep Blue. There's a good review here by Simon Singh, the guy that wrote Fermat's Last Theorem; he mentions that Edmund Cartwright set about building the first power weaving loom after seeing the Turk, reasoning that if a machine could play chess it must be possible to build one that could weave, and so contributing to the start of the industrial revolution.

BTW, the author of the Mechanical Turk is the technology correspondent of The Economist magazine, I see from his website.

but Charles Babbage is NOT the father of computing

[JDizzy]

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!