The Mechanical Turk: Enduring Misapprehensions Concerning Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

A curtainiswithdrawnandamachine rolled to within twelve feet of the nearest spectators: a large box of maple wood on castors or brazen rollers with a puppet like a pantomime Turk at the back (see Figure 1). His right arm extended to the chequer-board on the table, his left supporting a pipe, the Turk is wrapped in a heavy green cloak. But he is discovered to consist of mechanical parts, operated by a larger clockwork engine in the box.1 Having inspected the compartments containing this mechanism, spectators engage the Mechanical Turk in a game of chess: the Turk moving the pieces with his left hand, eyes and head rolling in triumph, on putting his enemy into check he will cry Échec! Échec! Built by Wolfgang von Kempelen for the Empress Maria Theresa in 1769, the Turk is said to have won games against Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte, mystifying audiences in Europe and America with a winning streak lasting eighty-four years, only ended by a fire in 1854, in which the mechanism is said to have perished screaming: Échec!.2 In his own eyewitness account of the Automaton, produced shortly after seeing the chess-player in action while on tour in America in 1836, Edgar Allen Poe suggests that no exhibition of the kind has ever elicited such speculation. ‘Wherever seen it has been an object of intense curiosity, to all persons who think’, remarks Poe. ‘Yet the question of its modus operandi is still undecided … accordingly we find every where men of mechanical genius, of great general acuteness, and discriminative understanding, who make no scruple in pronouncing the Automaton a pure machine, unconnected with human agency in its movements, and consequently, beyond all comparison, the most astonishing of the inventions of mankind.’3