The chess-playing machine that had a man inside
From 1770, a turbaned mechanical figure beat players across Europe and America at chess. It was a brilliant hoax, and Amazon named a service after it.
In 1770, the Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen presented a marvel to Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna: a life-sized figure in Ottoman robes seated at a cabinet, which played chess, and played it well.
Before each game, the operator opened the cabinet doors to show gears and clockwork. Then the figure moved its arm, picked up pieces and beat most challengers.
The secret
Hidden inside was a skilled human chess player, who slid about to stay out of view when the doors were opened, followed the game through magnets under the board, and controlled the arm with levers. The machinery on display was mostly for show.
A long tour
The Turk toured Europe and America for decades:
- Benjamin Franklin played it, and kept a book about it in his library.
- Napoleon is said to have played it in 1809, trying illegal moves until the Turk swept the pieces off the board, but the versions of the story vary and it is probably exaggerated.
- In 1836, Edgar Allan Poe published “Maelzel’s Chess-Player”, arguing that it must contain a person. Many of his specific guesses were wrong, but the conclusion was right.
The Turk was destroyed by fire in Philadelphia on 5 July 1854.
Its name lives on
In 2005 Amazon launched Amazon Mechanical Turk, a marketplace where people are paid to do small tasks that computers can’t yet handle, such as labelling images and transcribing text. Much of the data used to train modern AI has been labelled this way. It’s an honest name: behind the apparent automation, there are people.
Bring it up
“There was an 18th-century ‘chess computer’ that toured Europe for decades. A human chess master was hidden inside it.”
Follow the thread
- RelatedFrom a bedroom GPU to ChatGPT Modern AI is trained on huge amounts of data labelled by people, often through platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk.
- RelatedThe dream of thinking machines is thousands of years old The dream of a thinking machine was strong enough that people wanted to believe in a fake one.
- Same patternThe 1960s chatbot people confided in Both show how readily people credit a machine with a mind.
- RelatedComputers began as looms The age of clever automata that also produced programmable looms.
