Mechanical Turk

Also, the opposite of thanks to Jonathan Strickland, a.k.a.

The Quister, who will be returning with us for an episode about the Mechanical Turk.

Oh, the Mechanical

Turk.

Hi, welcome to another episode of ColdFusion.

In 1770, Hungarian author and inventor Wolfgang von Kemplen built and unveiled a self-operating chess-playing machine called the Mechanical Turk.

In demonstrations around Europe, his chess-playing invention won most of its games against actual human chess players, and it's even said that it went on to beat players like Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin.

Naturally, the invention was extremely popular, a marvel of its day.

The transactions and logistics were automatically taken care of behind the scenes by AI.

An elegant combination of computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning.

Or was it? Just like the Mechanical Turk, all was not as it seemed.

Amazon's so-called AI technology was actually powered by a thousand people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts.

If we connect all this back to the expert commentary, the ultimate conclusion is really striking.

Historically, a lot of robotics in these early stages was like the mechanical Turk.

You mean the old chess-playing machine from the 1800s that secretly just had a human hiding inside a box pulling the levers?

Precisely.

Yep

... and what they call The Mechanical Turk.

Yeah.

What can you tell me about The Mechanical Turk?

The first, uh, instance of cheating in chess is The Mechanical Turk.

What do you mean, cheating?

Uh, they built a contraption that made people think it was, uh, it was a machine that was playing moves.

I don't know when the first train was built, but, uh, th-

... automaton who did have a guy.

In our world, there is a real chess-playing automata called The Turk that was, uh-

That's the one I was thinking of.

I see

More interesting is, well, and there are wonderful anecdotes about it being that old, but is to come to the 18th century.

about 300 years ago, 200 years ago, the Mechanical Turk.

This is ambition to turn chess into a machine that can play humans.

What was the Mechanical Turk, Oliver?

Yeah, the Mechanical Turk was an automaton, just sort of a robot developed by Wolfgang von Kemplen, who was this sort of court engineer in Austria-Hungary.

And in the 1700s, automatons were all the rage.

They were automatons that... played the trumpet.

And I hope, needless to say, given that this was the 1700s, it was a complete sham.

So...

Your book pretty much takes us all the way back to the Mechanical Turk, the centuries-old fascination with building a machine that could play chess.

And something I kept wondering while I was reading was why chess? You know, of all the things that early computer scientists could have used to test machine intelligence, why did beating humans at chess specifically become such an important goal for them?

Yeah, I think it predates just what you said.

It predates even the computer age that there was this kind of, well, he called it a mechanical Turk, an automaton, this inventor from Budapest in the 1700s who traveled around like a carnival barker with this chess-playing automaton.

And it blew people's minds because it could move on its own and it was full of

cogs and wheels.

Do you have a diagram of the original one? Was it a, was it a tiny man in a, uh, little window that was just like throwing o- money out when you press buttons?

Another Mechanical Turk situation.

Mechanical Turk.

Yeah.

[laughs]

That's right.

It was a-

You gonna fact-check us on that, Dr. Jim? Mechanical Turk.

So Descartes, the philosopher, I think therefore I am philosopher, he talked about thinking machines and he was specifically talking about automata instead of a computer because computers didn't exist at that point.

He had no conception of a computer, but he was surrounded by all these clockwork mechanisms and automata, which were just essentially rudimentary robots that worked with clockwork mechanisms where there was this idea of a mechanical Turk that could play chess and beat chess masters at chess.

Turns out it was a dwarf inside of a cabinet.

Okay.