This story was mentioned a couple of days ago on a radio broadcast and it caught my interest. This piece has been reproduced from a long and informative article by Atlas Obscura in Slate in 2015.
Warnings over the perils of artificial
intelligence arms races have made headlines of
late, but debates over the possibilities of AI have been raging since the 1770s.
At the dawn of that
decade, an inventor by the name of Wolfgang von Kempelen debuted his
latest creation in Vienna: A chess-playing automaton made
for Habsburg Archduchess Maria Theresa. Known initially as the Automaton Chess
Player and later as the Mechanical Turk—or just the Turk—the machine consisted
of a mechanical man dressed in robes and a turban who sat at a wooden
cabinet that was overlaid with a chessboard. The Turk was designed to play
chess against any opponent game enough to challenge him.
At the Viennese court in 1770,
Von Kempelen began his demonstration of The Turk’s workings by opening the
doors and drawers of the cabinet and shining a candle inside each section.
Inside were cogs, gears, and other clockwork. After closing the cabinet, von
Kempelen invited a volunteer to serve as the Turk’s opponent.
Gameplay began with the Turk moving
his head from side to side to survey the board before appearing to decide
on the first move. His left arm then jerked forward, the fingers
splayed, and he picked up a chess piece, moving it to another square before
setting it down.
So far, this was relatively
standard stuff—at the time, automata in the form of mechanical animals and
expressive humanoids had delighted many a royal and commoner. One of the most
prominent automata makers, Jacques de Vaucanson, had not only created the Digesting
Duck—which wiggled its beak, quacked, and pooped out pellets it had
been fed—but also the Flute Player, an automaton that could, in the words of
Tom Standage in The Turk, “mimic
almost all of the subtleties of a human flute player’s breathing and musical
expression.”
Compared to these masterful
simulacra, the Turk, with his expressionless face made of carved wood and jerky
arm movements, initially seemed an inferior product. But then came the rest of
the chess game. The Turk was good. Really good. And it wasn’t just
adept at executing a repetitive task. The Turk responded skillfully
to the unpredictable behavior of humans.
This machine seemed to be operating
autonomously, guided by its own sense of rationality and reason. If the human
opponent attempted to cheat, as Napoleon
did when facing off against the machine in 1809, the Turk would
move the chess piece back to its previous position, and, after repeated
cheating attempts, would swipe his arm across the board, scattering pieces to
the ground.
Of course, there had to be a
trick to all of this. But the nature of the deception was, for many decades,
elusive. Following the 1770 demonstration, which astonished Maria Theresa and
her attendants, von Kempelen, an engineer rather than an entertainer, was
content to let the Turk rest. The automaton sat in a neglected state until
after Maria Theresa’s death, when her son and royal successor, Joseph II, remembered
the Turk and asked von Kempelen to revive it.
In 1783, von Kempelen took
the Turk on tour to Paris, where he once again astonished onlookers—including a
certain chess-loving American by the name of Benjamin Franklin.
Tours of England and Germany
followed over the next year. During this time, people began to publish their
speculative accounts of the Turk’s workings. Some, such as British author
Philip Thicknesse, were indignant at the notion that the Turk was a purely
mechanical creation whose gameplay was free from human influence. “That an
AUTOMATON can be made to move the Chessmen properly, as a pugnacious player, in
consequence of the preceding move of a stranger, who undertakes to play against
it, is UTTERLY IMPOSSIBLE,” wrote Thicknesse in a critical
pamphlet he passion-published in 1784. (The immoderate word
capitalisation is all his.)
He wrote in his pamphlet that the
cabinet must be concealing “a child of ten, twelve, or fourteen years of
age”—presumably one whose chess talents were prodigious.
The notion that someone was
hiding in the cabinet was espoused frequently over
the decades, with variations on the size of the hypothetical person as well as
their positioning. The cabinet measured four feet long, two-and-a-half feet
deep, and three feet high—dimensions that encouraged people to speculate
that short-statured people and children were the most likely candidates
for the role of hidden Turk operator. Some believed that the concealed person
stayed in the cabinet the whole time, using strings, pulleys, and magnets to
execute the chess moves, while others thought the operator crawled up into
the body of the Turk in order to control him.
Then there was the complication
of the pre-demonstration routine in which von Kempelen would open the cabinet
doors and drawers and shine a candle inside, seemingly precluding the presence
of a human. But this, too, was cited as a mere trick—in 1789, Freiherr zu
Racknitz proposed that the concealed operator hid in the back of the cabinet’s
bottom drawer during the pre-game display, then moved to the main portion.
A foolproof plan
if ever there was one.
Such outlandish stories, while
entertaining, added unnecessary complications. The truth was simpler: the
Turk did operate via a concealed operator, who controlled each movement from
inside the cabinet by candlelight, pulling levers to operate the Turk’s arm and
keeping track of the moves on their own board. Von Kempelen, and his
Turk-touring successor, Johann Maelzel, picked up new chess players on
their travels, gave them a quick how-to orientation, then bundled them into the
cabinet.
Though the machine ultimately
relied on human behavior and a bit of old-fashioned magic, its convincingly
mechanical nature was cause for both wonder and concern. Arriving
smack-bang in the middle of the industrial revolution, the Turk raised unsettling
questions about the nature of automation and the possibility of creating
machines that could think. The fact that the Turk appeared to operate on
clockwork mechanisms, complete with whirring sounds, contradicted the idea that
chess was, in the words of Robert Willis in 1821,
“the province of intellect alone.” If a machine could play a human game at the
mercy of the human whims of its opponent, what else could it do?
“Unlike the new machines of the
industrial revolution, which replaced human physical activity, this fragment of
the Difference Engine, like the Turk, raised the possibility that machines
might eventually be capable of replacing mental activity too,” writes Tom
Standage in The Turk.
In the 1820s and
‘30s, Maelzel took the machine for one last hurrah around the
northeast United States, during which Edgar Allan Poe developed a fondness for
it and wrote his own
treatise on the human-assisted operations he assumed were
in place during gameplay. But the thrill of the Turk was fading. By the 1850s,
with Maelzel having perished during a Turk tour of Cuba, the machine sat forgotten in
the Chinese Museum in Philadelphia. It was there that, in 1854, it succumbed to
a fire.
Though the Turk could be called a
fraud, to regard the machine as a mere trick or swindle is to dismiss
the profound and disruptive questions it introduced. The Turk may not have
been intelligent, but it pointed toward an all-too-easily imaginable
future of machines that can think for themselves—an ethical conundrum with
which even the world’s AI experts are still
struggling.
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