Robot History: The Turk & El Ajedrecista
A recent post on SuicideBots (must have been a slow news day…) reminds us that you should be at least passingly familiar with The Turk and El Ajedrecista - two famous robots of time long past.
Obscure maybe, but this is about the same as geologists who all know that on November 7 in 1492 the Ensisheim Meteorite, the oldest with a known impact date, struck the earth around noon in a wheat field outside the village of Ensisheim, Alsace. This kind of thing just goes with the territory. As a former library scientist I know very well where Metuchen NJ is - and nobody else really needs to know that.
So, according to SuicideBots, one of the most famous robots was the chess playing “Turk”, built by wunderkind Wolfgang von Kempelen of what is now Slovakia. It wasn’t actually a robot, but a very elaborate prank. Both front panels rolled aside to expose the elaborate gears, pulleys, and complicated mechatronics that operated the Turk - who defeated Napoleon, Ben Franklin, and most of the chess masters on both sides of the Atlantic. More detail and further sources about The Turk in Wikipedia.
That’s the bottom line with The Turk - the contraption was a trick, not a true intelligent chess-playing robot. There was a real master chess player concealed within. Nevertheless, most of the complicated gears and pulleys were there for a good purpose and a decent animatronic android who would pick up the chess pieces and move them around the board. While a phoney chess player, the Turk was a true mechanical marvel.
But the hoax was discovered after a while, the gizmo changed hands a few times, and in 1854, 85 years after it’s construction, the Turk was destroyed in the great Philadelphia fire. However, while The Turk was not a true automaton, its ’successor’ El Ajedrecista was.
El Ajedrecista (The Chess Player) was an automaton built in 1912 by Leonardo Torres y Quevedo, introduced in 1914 and touted by Scientific American by the next year. The picture here shows the inventor demonstrating his automaton to none less than Norbert Weiner. According to Wikipedia:
Using electromagnets under the board, it automatically played a three chesspiece endgame moving a King and a Rook against a human opponent King. By today’s engineering standards, the automata built by Quevedo would not be viewed as remarkable. However, they were so in their day, more than ninety years ago. If an illegal move were made by the opposite player the automaton would signal it. The automaton did not play very precisely and it did not always deliver mate in the minimum amount of moves because of the simple algorithm that calculated the positions. It did however mate the opponent flawlessly every time.
El Ajedrecista is still working and on display at the Colegio de Ingenieros de Caminos, Canales y Puertos in Madrid. Unlike The Turk, it was a true automaton built to play chess without human guidance.
As SuicideBots sums it all up: “So there’s today’s history lesson. Rook takes Queen. Checkmate. You have to do the dishes for the next month.”
Source: “The Turk,” Suicide Bots 10/25/06.
Related Post: “A Short History of Robotics 1 - The Begininngs,” EBT Blog 09/18/06.
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January 18th, 2007 at 2:05 am
[…] Karakuri ningyo are mechanized puppets or automata from Japan that were built during Edo period (1603 to 1867). They’re always some kind of footnote in the computer course, like the Jacquard loom and El Ajedrecista, but who would have thought someone could still make them? To quote the company’s website: Karakuri dolls were introduced in the oldest manuscript of mechanical engineering in Japan, which was called Karakuri-zui. Setting the tea cup on the tray makes the doll move, and it stops when the tea cup is removed. If the cup is replaced, the doll swivels around and returns to its original position. Karakuri dolls were the first automata in Japan. Their movements are caused by the power of springs, mercury and sand. You can build them and take them apart easily without ever using metallic screws or nails. Karakuri dolls are a representative of the highest technology in the Edo period. It was difficult to pass the tradition down from generation to generation, because their production required not only the knowledge, but also a high level of craftsmanship. It is called a treasure trove since few original designs from those days still exist, and complete ones are even more rare. […]