Please ignore the man behind the curtain

AI Histories #5: The Mechanical Turk

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The Mechanical Turk via Wikipedia Commons

Napoleon liked chess. He played against his courtiers and against his companions. He enjoyed a quick game with the generals, diplomats, and intellectuals who moved in his orbit. By all accounts he was pretty good, which is probably not all that surprising.

His most famous opponent is only known by die-hard chess enthusiasts. That man was likely a German chess master called Johann Bapiste Allgiaer. Unfortunately, we don’t know with absolute certainty who the player was. That’s because neither Napoleon nor the audience could see them.

Instead, in the packed-out palace of Schönbrunn in Vienna, one of history’s best known figures thought he was playing an automaton. Dressed in the style of an Ottoman (or rather what Austrian high society thought an Ottoman looked like), that machine was the Mechanical Turk.

Behind its mahogany frame and sliding panels was the chess master. Whether Allgiaer or a mystery player, our man no doubt felt uncomfortable crammed into a small wooden box. But whatever the impracticalities, they weren’t enough to prevent Napoleon’s opponent from guiding the automaton’s actions from underneath the table.

Reports of the game — which admittedly are on the hazy side — tell us that the emperor made an illegal move to test the Turk’s reaction. His opponent reset the piece to its original position. Napoleon tried again with another illegal move. The Turk responded by removing the offending piece from the board.

On the third attempt, the story goes, the Turk dramatically swept all the pieces off the board. Satisfied he had sufficiently needled the automaton, the Frenchman tried his hand at a legitimate game. He was soundly beaten.

Vienna waits for you

The Turk was constructed in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen, a Hungarian nobleman with a knack for building things. Kempelen was inspired to construct the Turk following a visit to the Vienna court of Maria Theresa of Austria, where the great magician François Pelletier was performing a show.

Kempelen liked what he saw, but thought he could do one better. Resolving to upstage the Frenchman, he set out creating a show that blended the spectacle of performance and the precision of engineering.

The result was the Turk. On the outside, his machine looked like a life-sized figure clad in robes and a turban seated behind a wooden cabinet. Its left arm held a long pipe at rest, while its right lay on the top of a large cabinet.

From the inside, the machine was a tangle of clockwork and mirrors. Its board was magnetised, which allowed the operator to track and manoeuvre pieces from inside the device.

Opening doors on one side revealed clockwork-like gears, but the section was constructed to allow would-be inspectors to see through the device under certain conditions. Hidden doors under the model showed cogs to maintain the illusion that the cabinet was filled with mechanisms.

In reality, neither the visible clockwork nor the drawer extended fully to the back of the table. A sliding seat on the interior allowed our hidden chess player to shift position as the dummy doors were opened to dazzle onlookers.

The act began by unlatching the doors, much like a magician shows the audience there’s nothing up his sleeve. On its first exhibition in the Vienna palace, Kempelen made an elaborate show of allowing the crowd to inspect the device.

Once the audience was suitably convinced nothing untoward was going on, the games began. One of the first to play was Count Ludwig von Cobenzl, an Austrian courtier at the palace. He was quickly defeated by the Turk’s aggressive style of play, while a host of others who fancied their chances met a similar fate.

Despite the fanfare caused by the Turk, its designer quickly lost interest in the project. The machine only played a handful of opponents in the ten years following its debut.

Kempelen was by all accounts bored by his creation. He wanted to work on steam engines rather than spending time assembling and disassembling the Turk, which he famously decried as a ‘bagatelle’ (that is, a trifle).

But the Habsburg crown had other ideas. In 1781, Kempelen was ordered by Emperor Joseph II to reconstruct the Turk and deliver it to Vienna for a state visit from Grand Duke Paul of Russia and his wife. After another successful appearance, the court suggested a tour of Europe.

Fearing upsetting the powers that be, Kempelen agreed.

The first stop was France, where the Turk faced off against opponents in Versailles and Paris. Against more practiced players, the machine — or rather the man under the table — won some matches but lost others.

The Turk's final game in the City of Light was against Benjamin Franklin, who was serving as ambassador to France from the United States. Franklin reportedly enjoyed the game with the Turk, but was ultimately beaten.

Second Act

After Kempelen’s death, the Bavarian musician and inventor Johann Nepomuk Mälzel purchased the Turk from his son in 1805. Best known for perfecting the metronome, Mälzel once again took the Turk to the courts of Europe (including for its famous bout with Napoleon).

Under Mälzel, the Turk became a symbol of modernity. It returned to Paris and London, eventually crossing the Atlantic to show American audiences what they had been missing.

In Richmond, Virginia, a young Edgar Allan Poe watched it play. In his essay Maelzel’s Chess-Player, Poe tried to deduce the mechanics of the system. He mostly failed, but his broader point was that the influence of the Turk lay in its ability to evoke mystery.

By this point, the Turk’s fame wasn't really about chess. The illusion endured because it touched a nerve during an age in which politics, technology, and economics began a great reconfiguration.

In 1838, Johann Mälzel died aboard a ship off the American coast, and the automaton— now worn from decades of travel — was left to gather dust in a Philadelphia museum.

Then, in 1854, the Turk went up in flames when a blaze engulfed the site. With neither Turk nor master still standing, former operators and witnesses came forward to expose its secrets.

The world now knew how the figure inside used levers to manipulate the arm, how the cabinet’s compartments were rigged for misdirection, and how the illusion was kept alive through carefully orchestrated performance.

The story of the Turk is about intelligence as theatre. Its secrets remained hidden for so long because people wanted to believe that the mind could be made mechanical. For those of us interested in where AI came from and where it is going, the Turk reminds us that artificial intelligence is part reality and part projection.

That isn’t to say modern AI is a hoax or anything like it, but rather that conceptions of intelligence are fluid. We read into intelligent machines whatever we need to. Some people see the entire AI project as a menagerie of smoke and mirrors. Others see god-like machines just around the corner.

The point is that AI is a container into which we pour our beliefs and biases. That was true when Napoleon faced off against the man in the box, and it’s still true over 200 years later.