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.

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!

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

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!