The Chess Cheat in the 21st Century
If only the 18th-century hoaxer could see his “Mechanical Turk” now. The post The Chess Cheat in the 21st Century appeared first on Nautilus.
Wolfgang von Kempelen, the 18th-century inventor and author, once claimed to have created a chess-playing robot, called the Mechanical Turk. How was this possible, almost two centuries before computers were invented? Easy. By fraud.
The Turk was just a box containing a hidden chess master. Back then, the idea of an automaton that could play good chess was impossible. Even in 1997, when the IBM computer Deep Blue defeated the then-reigning chess champion Garry Kasparov, he that one of the moves Deep Blue made during the game had actually come from a human.
