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....

Re:gain computers, lose clockwork

[Beautyon]

Ummm you dont know whats happening in watchmaking obiously:

The Erotic Hour Striker Jaquemart for a fine example of modern watchmaking.

Nothing has been lost at all.

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.

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.

Re:If you ever get across to London...

[cornflux]

Oddly enough, I've just returned from a week-long vacation (holiday, if you prefer) in London and was able to visit the Babbage exhibit.

For as much as Babbage contributed, I found the exhibit extremely lacking in information and delinquent in relating the importance of his work.

They did indeed have difference engine #2, however it was covered and being worked on by a couple gentlemen who did not appear willing or capable of fielding an inquiry.

Also, the exhibit neglected to make any significant mention of Babbage's work outside of the difference engine(s): encryption, politics, analytical engine, etc.

As a side note, I did, however, find that their weather exhibit was excellent and very informative. On the other hand, the mathematics exhibit was, like the Babbage exhibit, disappointing.

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
  

Good read...

[powerlinekid]

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?

Re:Good read...

[Restil]

Even if you're REALLY good at something, if you play against someone whom you consider or assume to be considerably inferior to you, you will tend to unconsiously dumb down your strategy, and then even if you're a grandmaster, anyone of relatively decent skill will be able to beat you.

The people playing the Turk weren't really playing to win. They were playing to see if this machine could play the game. They were too amazed by its ability to play AT ALL to bother much with trying to beat it. They might even intentionally make stupid "I wonder if he'll catch this" mistakes which ultimately sacrifice the game for them, no matter HOW good they might be.

Probably the only time it got beat was the one time that someone actually paid attention to the game itself, rather than the opposing player.

-Restil

Re:Good read...

[darien]

I read in today's Sunday Telegraph that the chess pieces were magnetic, and each square on the board had a metal flap attached to the underside which was held up by the magnet. The chap in the box could see which flap had dropped and which had flipped up and so work out which piece had been moved where and replicate it on his own (probably miniature) chessboard. The same article also described that the Turk's arm was actually part of a pantograph, so the man inside just had to move a pointer to the relevant place on his chess-board and the Turk's hand would move to the same place on the outside board. He then simply had to squeeze the bulb/lever that made the Turk close its hand, move the pantograph pointer to the new square, and let go. A very ingenious and (I would imagine) well-executed piece of engineering.

Afraid I threw the paper away, and I can't find the article on the web, but I'm 99% certain this is all from Tom Standage's book.

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!

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.

Impossible?

[Alomex]

"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.

Other purposes

[attackiko]

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!

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!