The Mechanical Turk and other chess-playing machines

In 1770 Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen wowed the Viennese court with ‘The Turk', a clockwork automaton sat before a chessboard. Kempelen claimed that his invention would best any human chess player. Indeed, the Baron and the Turk travelled around Europe and wowed onlookers with the latter’s prodigious talent.

The Turk was a hoax, and its talent actually belonged to the poor person hiding under the table. However, it inspired people to think more about chess playing machines, and in 1950 Shannon and Turing both published papers on the subject. By the 1960s computers were playing reasonable chess: John McCarthy (dubbed the father of AI) and Alan Kotok at MIT developed a program that would best most beginners. This program, running on an IBM 7090, played a correspondence match via telegraph against an M-2 machine run by Alexander Kronrod’s team at ITEP in Moscow.

This was the first machine versus machine match in history, and the Soviets won 3-1. Their program evolved into KAISSA, after the goddess of chess, which became the computer chess champion in 1974. By the early 80s the chess community began to speculate that sooner or later a computer would defeat a world champion. Indeed, in 1988 IBM’s Deep Thought shared first place at the US Open, though reigning world champion Garry Kasparov resoundingly defeated it the following year. In 1996 Deep Blue stunned the world by winning its first game against Kasparov, although the reigning world champion went on to win the match 4-2. The machine was upgraded and succeeded in beating Kasparov the following year, though not without controversy. Since then computers regularly beat their inferior meatbag competition, although their prowess is driven by algorithmic advances.