The secret of the chess-playing "Mechanical Turk"

Willis, Robert. An Attempt to Analyse the Automaton Chess Player of Mr. de Kempelen. With an easy method of imitating the movements of that celebrated figure [...]. To which is added, a copious collection of the knight's moves over the chess board.

€ 9.500,00

First edition of a ground-breaking study in the analysis of machine intelligence, focusing on the "Mechanical Turk", an automaton chess-player that wowed audiences with its ability to defeat human opponents in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The work of the Austro-Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734-1804), the "Turk" was first presented at the court of the Empress Maria Theresa in 1770 and went on to perform numerous sell-out tours of Europe and America over the following decades, in which it proved itself capable of confounding such formidable adversaries as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. The machine was also capable of completing a "Knight's Tour", a difficult challenge requiring a player to move the knight all around the board, visiting every square once, a feat also addressed in this volume. The nature of its workings was a closely-guarded secret, but Willis correctly suspected that the contraption merely concealed a human player inside. Nonetheless, the device was never accurately described while it existed (it perished in 1854, in a fire in Philadelphia), and the scrutiny of its operations laid important groundwork in the study of early computing and machine intelligence.

Robert Willis (1800-75), an English engineer, attended a performance of the "Turk" in London and noted several discrepancies in its operation, such as the fact that there was no correspondence between how long its clockwork was wound and how many moves it produced. This prompted other speculative essays, including one of Edgar Allen Poe, which was influential in sparking speculative fiction about the future of machine intelligence.

A seminal early work in the study of machine intelligence.