Artificial Intelligence in the 18th Century?
In the 18th century, there was a lot of excitement over a chess machine that successfully beat one clever person after another. Was this some amazing automated robot – like a precursor to AI – or was there something else going on?
In 1770, inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen dumbfounded everyone in the imperial court. He wanted to impress the Archduchess Maria Theresa and presented her with his invention "the Mechanical Turk": a chess machine that – surprisingly enough – beat every volunteer who played against it that day.
The Turk
The chess machine consisted of a wooden box topped by a life-sized puppet wearing Ottoman clothing and a turban. Hence its name the Mechanical Turk. On top of the box was a chessboard with chess pieces and it had a large number of rotating gears inside to allow the machine to move the pieces.
News of the intelligent chess machine spread very rapidly. Everyone wanted to play against the Mechanical Turk, so the machine went on tour. During its tour the machine played against many celebrities, including American politician Benjamin Franklin, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, and the inventor of the precursor of the computer, Charles Babbage. Time after time, the Turk won the match.
AI in the 18th century?
A machine that thinks and acts like a human being does sound like artificial intelligence (AI) in the 18th century. However, many scientists still had their doubts about it. They tried to discover the secret behind the machine, but the Turk was so well designed that it was difficult to prove any of their theories.
It was only in 1836 that author Edgar Allan Poe declared in an essay that it was a hoax. He suggested that there was probably a small person inside the figure. Later it emerged that there was indeed a man in the machine. Not inside the puppet itself, but in the wooden box. The complex arrangement of gears inside the machine was intended to create a hiding-place for a flesh-and-blood player. Investigators also found magnets connected to the chess board to allow the real human chess player to follow the game.
Chess computer
After this revelation, the public lost interest in the Mechanical Turk. Eventually, it ended up in an American museum, where it was destroyed in a fire in 1854.
More than 200 years after Wolfgang von Kempelen's invention, the unthinkable finally happened: in 1997, the chess computer Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparov. It was not the Mechanical Turk, but this supercomputer that represented a milestone in the history of artificial intelligence.
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