John Shedletsky March 14, 2003 Prof Henry Lowood STS145 Case Study On the Romance of Regicide: The Turk, Kasparov, and Deep Blue “Chess is beautiful enough to waste your life for,” the oft-quoted aphorism of Dutch Grandmaster Hans Rees, most succinctly describes the human obsession with the ancient game of kings. For centuries, the act of playing chess has been upheld as the very paragon of intellectual activity. Voltaire said, “Chess is the game which reflects most honor on human wit,” and Goethe called chess “The touchstone of intellect” (Spaans). The first internationally recognized World Champion of the game, Paul Morphy, echoes these sentiments, “Chess is eminently and emphatically the philosopher's game.” (ChessVille) The deep strategic nuances of the game has kept players enamored with the game for centuries and more books have been written about chess than all other games combined. It is the game’s reputation as both a strategically deep system and as a thinking man’s activity that originally made the idea of a mechanized chess player an intriguing notion. There is a romantic appeal to building machines to do battle with the mind of man that has propelled computer chess from humble beginnings to the 1997 defeat of world champion Garry Kasparov to IBM’s Deep Blue. The seminal paper in the field of computer chess was written by Claude Shannon in 1949 and since then generations of chess programmers have looked to it for inspiration (Atkinson 39). It was about this time in the United States that the nascent field of artificial intelligence looked ready to burst forth with revolutionary thinking machines. Such was the enthusiasm of the time that Herbert Simon (an AI researcher and Carnegie Mellon and a Nobel laureate in Economics) and Allen Newell suggested in 1958 that,“Within ten years a digital computer will be the world’s chess champion, unless the rules bar it from competition” (7). In this great era of exploration, researchers were looking for model problems to develop new AI techniques with that, they hoped, would eventually lead to a mathematical model of conscious decision making – the true artificial intelligence that the world has yet to witness. In 1950, an abbreviated version of Claude Shannon’s paper was printed in Scientific American, making the case for the use of chess as a model system to be used for this purpose. “The investigation of a chess-playing program is intended to develop techniques that can be used for more practical applications,” he wrote. “The chess machine is an ideal one to start with for several reasons. The problem is sharply defined, both in the allowed operation and the ultimate goal. It is neither so simple as to be trivial or too difficult for satisfactory solution. And such a machine could be pitted against a human opponent, giving a clear measure of the machine’s ability in this kind of reasoning.” (48) For these reasons, the idea of building a machine that could play chess better than any man became one of the holy grails in the field of artificial intelligence (Bynum, 215). Surprisingly, the romance of chess-playing machines begins centuries before Claude Shannon or even before the computer. At first, computer chess was the realm of dreamers. In 1770, Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen constructed an automaton composed a manikin sitting cross-legged on a four by two by three foot wooden cabinet, sporting a handsome turban. The automaton was capable of playing chess. Though Kempelen never gave his creation a name, it was known throughout Europe as “The Turk” (Standage, 23). The Turk had an illustrious and prolific playing career. When first built it was displayed at the court Austrian Empress Marie Theresa in Vienna to the empress’s delight. In 1783,after a tour through Russia, the Turk was again exhibited in Vienna for Emperor Joseph II. The same year the machination beat Benjamin Franklin in a game played in Paris. Two years later, while the Turk was touring Prussia, Fredrick the Great played it a game and lost. Perhaps the most famous game the Turk ever played was against Napoleon Bonaparte at Schonburnn during the Wagram campaign in 1809, checkmating the emperor in 24 moves. In 1820, the Turk sailed west to America where it visited New York, Boston and Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, the excitement caused by the Turk resulted in the formation of the first American chess club there. Charles Carroll, one of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence, played the Turk in 1827 (Wall). Edgar Allen Poe wrote about the Turk on two separate occasions, once in 1836 in an analytical essay describing how the machine worked, and again in 1850, when the machine was featured in a short story called Von Kempelen and His Discovery (Standage, 211). The Turk’s celebrated 85 year career came in an end in 1854 when it was destroyed in a great fire that devastated Philadelphia. The Turk, of course, was merely a brilliant illusion, not a brilliant chess-playing machine. Though the doors of its cabinet could be opened to demonstrate that there was only machinery inside, a small chess master could be squeezed into a secret compartment and control the automaton’s moves. Over the course of its long history, the Turk was occupied by no fewer than 15 masters of the game (Wall). Von Kempelen very pointedly never claimed that the Turk was actually playing chess for itself (Standage). Considering the power of some of Turk’s more historical opponents, this was no doubt a wise decision. As the Industrial Revolution trundled on and people became more familiar with what a machine could and could not be expected to do, that the Turk was an elaborate hoax became the prevailingopinion. But this did not dispel the Turk’s mystique. The very idea that a machine could be constructed that would play chess was the most compelling aspect of the Turk’s novelty – it set the imagination on fire. At the time of the Turk’s demise, ideas regarding the creation of honest chess automata had already been engendered. Charles Babbage, a man born before his time, was consumed for much of his life by a powerful vision of programmable computing machines. Today he is recognized as one of the grandfathers of the Digital Age. Limited by technology in Victorian England, his greatest invention, the Difference Engine, an enormous mechanical calculator, was not actually constructed until 1996 (Swade).
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