Mechanical Turk
Mechanical Turk
Mechanical Turk
The knight's tour, as solved by the Turk. The closed loop that is
formed allows the tour to be completed from any starting point on the board. [22]
Another part of the machine's exhibition was the completion of the knight's tour, a famed chess
puzzle. The puzzle requires the player to move a knight around a chessboard, touching each
square once along the way. While most experienced chess players of the time still struggled with
the puzzle, the Turk was capable of completing the tour without any difficulty from any starting
point via a pegboard used by the operator with a mapping of the puzzle laid out.[22]
The Turk also had the ability to converse with spectators using a letter board. The operator, whose
identity during the period when Kempelen presented the machine at Schönbrunn Palace is
unknown,[23] was able to do this in English, French, and German. Carl Friedrich Hindenburg, a
university mathematician, kept a record of the conversations during the Turk's time in Leipzig and
published it in 1789 as Über den Schachspieler des Herrn von Kempelen und dessen
Nachbildung (or On the Chessplayer of Mr. von Kempelen And Its Replica). Topics of questions
put to and answered by the Turk included its age, marital status, and its secret workings. [24]
Tour of Europe[edit]
Following word of its debut, interest in the machine grew across Europe. Kempelen, however, was
more interested in his other projects and avoided exhibiting the Turk, often lying about the
machine's repair status to prospective challengers. Von Windisch wrote at one point that
Kempelen "refused the entreaties of his friends, and a crowd of curious persons from all countries,
the satisfaction of seeing this far-famed machine".[25] In the decade following its debut at
Schönbrunn Palace the Turk only played one opponent, Sir Robert Murray Keith, a Scottish noble,
and Kempelen went as far as dismantling the Turk entirely following the match. [26] Kempelen was
quoted as referring to the invention as a "mere bagatelle", as he was not pleased with its
popularity and would rather continue work on steam engines and machines that replicated human
speech.[27]
In 1781, Kempelen was ordered by Emperor Joseph II to reconstruct the Turk and deliver it
to Vienna for a state visit from Grand Duke Paul of Russia and his wife. The appearance was so
successful that Grand Duke Paul suggested a tour of Europe for the Turk, a request to which
Kempelen reluctantly agreed.[28]
Following the repurchase, Mälzel brought the Turk back to Paris, where he made acquaintances of
many of the leading chess players at Café de la Régence. Mälzel stayed in France with the
machine until 1818, when he moved to London and held a number of performances with the Turk
and many of his other machines. In London, Mälzel and his act received a large amount of press,
and he continued improving the machine,[49] ultimately installing a voice box so the machine could
say "Échec!" when placing a player in check.[50]
In 1819, Mälzel took the Turk on a tour of the United Kingdom. There were several new
developments in the act, such as allowing the opponent the first move and eliminating the king's
bishop's pawn from the Turk's pieces. This pawn handicap created further interest in the Turk, and
spawned a book by W. J. Hunneman chronicling the matches played with this handicap. [51] Despite
the handicap, the Turk (operated by Mouret at the time)[52] ended up with forty-five victories, three
losses, and two stalemates.[53]
Mälzel in North America[edit]
The appearances of the Turk were profitable for Mälzel, and he continued by taking it and his
other machines to the United States. In 1826, he opened an exhibition in New York City that slowly
grew in popularity, giving rise to many newspaper stories and anonymous threats of exposure of
the secret. Mälzel's problem was finding a proper operator for the machine, [54] having trained an
unknown woman in France before coming to the United States. He ended up recalling a former
operator, William Schlumberger, from Alsace in Europe to come to America and work for him
again once Mälzel was able to provide the money for Schlumberger's transport.
Upon Schlumberger's arrival, the Turk debuted in Boston, Mälzel spinning a story that the New
York chess players could not handle full games and that the Boston players were much better
opponents.[55] This was a success for many weeks, and the tour moved to Philadelphia for three
months. Following Philadelphia, the Turk moved to Baltimore, where it played for a number of
months, including losing a match against Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of
Independence. The exhibition in Baltimore brought news that two brothers had constructed their
own machine, the Walker Chess-player. Mälzel viewed the competing machine and attempted to
buy it, but the offer was declined and the duplicate machine toured for a number of years, never
receiving the fame that Mälzel's machine did and eventually falling into obscurity. [56]
Mälzel continued with exhibitions around the United States until 1828, when he took some time off
and visited Europe, returning in 1829. Throughout the 1830s, he continued to tour the United
States, exhibiting the machine as far west as the Mississippi River and visiting Canada.
In Richmond, Virginia, the Turk was observed by Edgar Allan Poe, who was writing for
the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe's essay "Maelzel's Chess Player" was published in April
1836 and is the most famous essay on the Turk, even though many of Poe's hypotheses were
incorrect (such as that a chess-playing machine must always win).[57]
Mälzel eventually took the Turk on his second tour to Havana, Cuba. In Cuba, Schlumberger died
of yellow fever in February 1838, leaving Mälzel without an operator for his machine. Dejected,
Mälzel died at sea in July 1838 at the age of 65 during his return trip, leaving his machinery with
the ship captain.[58][59]
Final years and beyond[edit]
A 1980s Turk reconstruction
When the ship on which Mälzel died returned, his various machines, including the Turk, fell into
the hands of Mälzel's friend, the businessman John Ohl. He attempted to auction off the Turk, but
owing to low bidding ultimately bought it himself for $400. [60] Only when John Kearsley
Mitchell from Philadelphia, Edgar Allan Poe's personal physician and an admirer of the Turk,
approached Ohl did the Turk change hands again.[3] Mitchell formed a restoration club and went
about the business of repairing the Turk for public appearances, completing the restoration in
1840.[61]
As interest in the Turk outgrew its location, Mitchell and his club chose to donate the machine to
the Chinese Museum of Charles Willson Peale. While the Turk still occasionally gave
performances, it was eventually relegated to the corners of the museum and forgotten about until
5 July 1854, when a fire that started at the National Theater in Philadelphia reached the Museum
and destroyed the Turk.[62] Mitchell believed he had heard "through the struggling flames ... the last
words of our departed friend, the sternly whispered, oft repeated syllables, 'echec! echec!!'" [63]
John Gaughan, an American manufacturer of equipment for magicians based in Los Angeles,
spent $120,000 building his own version of Kempelen's machine over a five-year period from
1984.[64] The machine uses the original chessboard, which was stored separately from the original
Turk and was not destroyed in the fire. The first public display of Gaughan's Turk was in
November 1989 at a history of magic conference. The machine was presented much as Kempelen
presented the original, except that the opponent was replaced by a computer running a chess
program.[65]
Revealing the secrets[edit]
While many books and articles were written during the Turk's life about how it worked, most were
inaccurate, drawing incorrect inferences from external observation.
The first articles on the mechanism were published in a French magazine entitled Le Magasin
pittoresque in 1834.[66] It was not until Silas Mitchell's series of articles for The Chess Monthly that
the secret was fully revealed. Mitchell, son of the final private owner of the Turk, [67] wrote that "no
secret was ever kept as the Turk's has been. Guessed at, in part, many times, no one of the
several explanations ... ever solved this amusing puzzle". As the Turk was lost to fire at the time of
this publication, Silas Mitchell felt that there were "no longer any reasons for concealing from the
amateurs of chess, the solution to this ancient enigma". [63]
The most important biographical history about the Chess-player and Mälzel was presented in The
Book of the First American Chess Congress, published by Daniel Willard Fiske in 1857.[59] The
account, "The Automaton Chess-Player in America", was written by Professor George Allen of
Philadelphia, in the form of a letter to William Lewis, one of the former operators of the chess
automaton.
In 1859, a letter published in the Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch by William F. Kummer, who
worked as an operator under John Mitchell, revealed another piece of the secret: a candle inside
the cabinet. A series of tubes led from the lamp to the turban of the Turk for ventilation. The smoke
rising from the turban would be disguised by the smoke coming from the other candelabra in the
area where the game was played.[68]
Later in 1859, an uncredited article appeared in Littell's Living Age that purported to be the story of
the Turk from French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. This was rife with errors ranging from
dates of events to a story of a Polish officer whose legs were amputated, but ended up being
rescued by Kempelen and smuggled back to Russia inside the machine.[69]
A new article about the Turk did not turn up until 1899, when The American Chess
Magazine published an account of the Turk's match with Napoleon Bonaparte. The story was
basically a review of previous accounts, and a substantive published account would not appear
until 1947, when Chess Review published articles by Kenneth Harkness and Jack Straley Battell
that amounted to a comprehensive history and description of the Turk, complete with new
diagrams that synthesized information from previous publications. Another article written in 1960
for American Heritage by Ernest Wittenberg provided new diagrams describing how the operator
sat inside the cabinet.[70]
In Henry A. Davidson's 1945 publication A Short History of Chess, significant weight is given to
Poe's essay which erroneously suggested that the player sat inside the Turk figure, rather than on
a moving seat inside the cabinet. A similar error would occur in Alex G. Bell's 1978 book The
Machine Plays Chess, which falsely asserted that "the operator was a trained boy (or very small
adult) who followed the directions of the chess player who was hidden elsewhere on stage or in
the theater ..."[71]
More books were published about the Turk toward the end of the 20th century. Along with Bell's
book, Charles Michael Carroll's The Great Chess Automaton (1975) focused more on the studies
of the Turk. Bradley Ewart's Chess: Man vs. Machine (1980) discussed the Turk as well as other
purported chess-playing automatons.[72]
It was not until the creation of Deep Blue, IBM's attempt at a computer that could challenge the
world's best players, that interest increased again, and two more books were published: Gerald M.
Levitt's The Turk, Chess Automaton (2000), and Tom Standage's The Turk: The Life and Times of
the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine, published in 2002.[73] The Turk was used
as a personification of Deep Blue in the 2003 documentary Game Over: Kasparov and the
Machine.[74]