
The Turk - techolic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk?wprov=sfla1
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sspencer
> _John Gaughan, an American manufacturer of equipment for magicians based in
> Los Angeles, spent $120,000 building his own version of Kempelen 's machine
> over a five-year period from 1984.[62] The machine uses the original
> chessboard, which was stored separately from the original Turk and was not
> destroyed in the fire. The first public display of Gaughan's Turk was in
> November 1989 at a history of magic conference. The machine was presented
> much as Kempelen presented the original, except that the opponent was
> replaced by a computer running a chess program.[63]_

That is a wonderful detail. I like the irony.

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yumraj
The first thing that comes to mind after reading this is the story about AI
startups using humans to fake results. :)

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donjoe
The German verb 'etwas türken' (~ to fake sth.) originates from The Turk
mentioned in the article.

[https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Türken_(Verb)](https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Türken_\(Verb\))

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doe88
Enlighting, I never realised what the eponym Amazon service meant until now.

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lainga
What did you think it meant?

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doe88
Seems dumb now in hindsight, but I never thought about its meaning at all.

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hbosch
Such a fascinating story. I’ll take the privilege of being the first one to
add this comment to the thread: this is where the Mechanical Turk service gets
its name.

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Theodores
The Turk played against quite a few prominent people known for their
intellect. Amongst those willing to take on the Turk were political leaders,
e.g. Napoleon.

In today's world I very much doubt our Western political leaders would know
the rules of the game well enough to rise to the challenge. They certainly
wouldn't have the patience or be queuing up to play.

We might have brilliant computers able to defeat any human opponent at chess,
however, I think we lost something along the way by not having leaders able to
take on The Turk.

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simen
Sounds like typical anti-politician bullshit. Most adults have at least a
passing familiarity with the rules of chess, I don't see any reason why world
leaders would be any different. Bill Clinton was on his university's chess
team. Obama is said to play chess, although he never played competitively. I
suppose you don't count them as Western, but the Russians, of course, take
chess extremely seriously. So seriously, in fact, that the new president of
FIDE, Arkady Dvorkovich, was deputy prime minister of Russia until May of
_this year_.

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0xBABAD00C
> Most adults have at least a passing familiarity with the rules of chess

If anyone ever needed proof that HN lives in a bubble :)

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simen
I did say passing familiarity, which is not a very high bar to clear. It's
been my experience, and I don't travel much in rarefied intellectual circles.

