Aside from being a 35-year-old career civil servant to Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, he was undoubtedly a renaissance man. While other automatons were limited to a finite amount of repetitive actions, the Mechanical Turk was seemingly the first fully-functional display of artificial intelligence. No invention, however, captured the attention of the world quite like Wolfgang von Kempelen’s enigmatic chessman. All were complex clockwork contraptions even by today’s standards. Innovations such as Leonardo da Vinci’s robotic knight and Jacques de Vaucanson’s Digesting Duck-which could be fed pellets and was subsequently capable of defecating-were created 30 years prior to the Turk.
A chic feature typical of circuses, traveling carnivals, and other touring exhibitions, these ingenious gadgets were variably operated by and orchestrated with axles, chains, cogs, gears, levers, pendulums, pulleys, wheels, and wind-up keys.Īutomata had been around for centuries, littered throughout ancient Greek mythology and brought to life over the years. In the 18th century, early animatronics were all the rage. But of course… it probably isn’t.” -Christopher Priest, The Prestige Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. The first part is called ‘The Pledge.’ The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. “Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. In its time, the Turk defeated challengers as prolific as American Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin Emperor of France, Napoléon Bonaparte Emperor of Russia, Paul I Empress of Russia, Catherine and King of Prussia, Frederick the Great-talk about a king’s gambit! Opening: The Pledge Like an Enlightenment-era Prometheus, the automaton chess player was allegedly a sensational, sentient thinking machine crafted by a royal servant with the android-like artifice of a mystic shaman from the Anatolian peninsula.
No-that dubious distinction belongs to Wolfgang von Kempelen’s incredible 1769 creation, the Mechanical Turk.Īs the American Revolution raged on across the pond, the robotically engineered, mustachioed Mechanical Turk toured Europe, and later the Americas.
The iconic 1996 victory of IBM’s supercomputer, Deep Blue, over chess champion and grandmaster, Garry Kasparov, wasn’t the first time man was bested by machine in one of the world’s oldest games.
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