When Charles Babbage Played Chess With the Original Mechanical Turk (ieee.org)

IEEE Spectrum is publishing a six-part series exploring the human history of AI. the_newsbeagle writes: The 19th century British engineer Charles Babbage is sometimes called the father of the computer. But his first design for a massive computing machine, a contraption called the Difference Engine that had some 25,000 parts, was just a giant calculator intended to handle logarithmic tables. It wasn't until he began designing his first Analytical Engine that he began to dream of a smart machine that could handle more general-purpose computations.

This short essay argues that Babbage's creative leap was inspired by an early example of AI hype: A supposed chess-playing machine called The Turk that had astounded onlookers throughout the courts of Europe. Babbage played two games against the Turk, and lost both.

Comments

Robot narratives

[TuringTest]

Western narrations about artificial intelligence are largely based upon the myths of either Galatea (think Pinocchio, the construct that becomes human) or Prometheus (Frankenstein, the dangers of bringing god-like power to humans).

However, the most realistic form of AI that we're going to interact with in the near future, works more like the Mechanical Turk: humans trying to fool humans into thinking that the puppet is life-like and has agency of it's own, while they pull the strings in the shadows.

In these times of Siris and Alexas, which largely are glorified chat bots scripted to make them look more intelligent than they are, it would be great if we had more stories approaching the subject from this angle. The Wizard of Oz is one such history, with it's "don't mind the man behind the curtain" is a good, well know one. I'd want to see many more modern examples of this story.