Gothic Steam Phantastic

Chess playing Turk

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At the end of the eighteenth century, an Austrian named Wolfgang von Kempelen built the automatic Turk. The Turk is a machine that plays chess. Recently (early 2004), the Heinz Nixdorfmuseum Forum has given life to the Turk again and made him play chess against the human mind.

Intellect in constructs are timeless. Starting with magical beings like The Golem, a clay man brought to life with Hebrew words, and evolved over the Automats and the Monster of Frankenstein to Ananova and The Terminator and other creatures that try to stand the Turing test.
These constructs have always had great attention. It is a step forwards to the question where the human intellect, the human mind, and human behaviour comes from. It’s a step closer to create everything that’s possible, for men is supposed to be an image of God, the creator of everything. Can we copy and create Gods masterpiece, mankind, as well?

Chess, from the word “Shah” (meaning King in Persian) is a noble game of Kings. People who know how to play chess have something sophisticated over them, high-brows play chess, and child-geniuses, and mathematicians. Thus, chess is the game to play with a machine that should resemble the better human mind. The chess game is build upon mathematical ideas, if you can compute the possibilities of each draft quick enough, you have a better change to win the game. The faster the computer, the better the chances are it wins over a human mind. Everyone playing chess will know that a fast machine can beat a human, even if such a machine doesn’t exist in their time.


Cogwheels in the interior of the automated Turk
However, it was all a fake. The Turk was played by a human chess-genius that hid into the machine. The cogwheels where just there to distract the audience.

A chess-playing machine never lost interest of the audiences. In 1912 El Ajedrecista was built, in 1945 Turing started working on chess playing computers. In the early 1980s, a chess computer was on sale in shops even for the common people. IBM built Deep Blue, the first computer to beat a human player, Kasparov in a top level game. It was 1997 by then. There was no small human hidden in Deep Blue. Deep Blue was computer dedicated to chess. Other super-computers like the Cray do not play chess, even though they can hide a human being.
Chess and machines, it has a long history. And it has some remarkable good elements for steampunk stories.

© Yaghish, 2007
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