he most famous machine that answered was a man in a box. The automaton chess player usually called the Turk was a life-sized figure in Ottoman dress seated behind a cabinet, and from 1770 until the 1850s it played chess against all comers in Europe and America, and usually won.

what it was

Wolfgang von Kempelen, an official at the Habsburg court, built it in 1770 to impress the Empress Maria Theresa. The show began with the cabinet doors opened in turn, revealing gears and machinery, to persuade the audience nothing living could fit inside. Something did: a skilled human chess player, hidden and shifting position as the doors were opened, who followed the game and moved the figure's arm from within. After Kempelen's death, the showman Johann Nepomuk Maelzel acquired it and took it on tour, eventually to the United States (Standage, 2002).

the people who tried to explain it

Many people guessed at the secret in print. Robert Willis (1821), later a Cambridge professor of applied mechanics, argued from the cabinet's dimensions that a person could hide inside. Edgar Allan Poe (1836) wrote a long essay arguing that a machine that plays chess, unlike a calculator, would have to make choices, so a person must be playing. His conclusion was right; Standage notes that several of Poe's supporting arguments were not.¹

why it still matters

The Turk was taken as proof of mechanical intelligence by people who wanted it to be, and its operators made sure the evidence pointed that way. The question it posed, how would you tell a thinking machine from a hidden person?, is the one Turing (1950) turned into a test. In 2005 a company named a crowd-work service after it, "Mechanical Turk": artificial artificial intelligence, people doing the tasks the software could not.

In the tour, the room of machines that answer has its own kiosk. The plain tour lists it.

notes

1. Standage's book is the readable modern account. The details we could check, on dates, owners, the opened doors and the end of the machine, are kept in a cabinet of their own, one drawer at a time.

Sources

1. Standage (2002). The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine. New York: Walker.
2. Willis (1821). An Attempt to Analyse the Automaton Chess Player of Mr. de Kempelen. London: J. Booth.
3. Poe (1836). Maelzel's Chess-Player. Southern Literary Messenger, April 1836.
4. Turing (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind. doi:10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433

see also

	timeline: machines that answer — from 1770
	Turing — the imitation game
	Clever Hans — a horse that answered