The Robot Chess Player Scam
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- Опубліковано 29 чер 2024
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Have you ever wondered how a mechanical chess-playing robot from the 1700s could defeat the best players of its time?
In this video, we uncover the fascinating story of the Turk, a legendary automaton that mesmerized audiences and confounded experts for almost 90 years. We'll delve into the intricate mechanisms and clever illusions that allowed the Turk to operate, revealing the truth behind its enigmatic moves and lifelike actions.
Join me as we model the Turk to demonstrate its workings and explore the legacy of one of history's greatest hoaxes. Be sure to stick around until the end of this video to learn more about our next giveaway.
Enter the giveaway at the link below:
primalnebula.com/giveaway/
Short on time? Feel free to skip ahead in this video using the chapter links below.
00:00 Introduction to the Turk
01:20 The Creation of the Turk
02:33 The Turk's European Tour
03:13 Johann Maelzel and the American Tour
05:08 The American Tour Continued
06:51 The Turk's Secrets Revealed
Thanks for watching this Primal Space video. If you enjoyed it, let me know in the comments below, and don't forget to subscribe so you can see more videos like this!
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Twitter:
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References:
primalnebula.com/the-turk-che...
Written and edited by Ewan Cunningham ( / ewan_cee )
3D Modeler: Orkun Zengin
Music used in this video:
Old Time Circus - Luella Gren
Last Snow - Hampus Naeselius
The Friendly Ghost - Arthur Benson
The Plan's Working - Cooper Cannell
Eternal Garden - Dan Henig
Für Elise - Traditional
Inspiring Cinematic Asia - Lexin Music
Melting Glass - Eden Avery
See You - Maxzwell
#MechanicalTurk #Chess #HistoricalHoaxes - Наука та технологія
*Correction: Napoleon played the Turk in 1809, not 1826, Napoleon was dead by then. My bad, just copied the wrong date (the start of the US tour) - Shoutout to GroundNews for making this video possible - get 40% Off the Vantage plan here: ground.news/primal
I can't but IBM Deep Blue can. :P
@@pyeitme508 what about stokfish 16.1
I suspect Amazon's Mechanical Turk was named after this device. It allows people to get simple, repetitious jobs (eg. labeling pictures), completed by real humans in remote locations. I always wondered where that name came from. And now I know! 👍
I could easily beat a Turk. What's chess?
Ground News just made me more biased lmao. Right wing sources are consistently less reliable and lower factuality / quality as rated by the site itself.
The Turk was a tease for the future, for when machine eventually would pass man.
When is the Chess update coming out?
Meow
Stock fish 16
What is up chess
@@ArcXDZthe turk and stockfish collab gonna be fire
But that means technically that chess master was in like the top 1% for chess. Crazy
Exactly. Unfortunate that someone so talented would be so unknown. But what an amazing secret to be holding onto as well haha
@@primalspace Par for the course for 18th century chess, sadly.
Not surprising. In Ancient China, many innovate things often taken up credits by relatives of high officials while the talents people remain unknown behind the scene and not allow to show themselves or theirs talents in public.
Can we for a second admire the fact that the mechanism could grab a chess piece and place it accurately on the board, with very little force required? That's astonishing for the time!
Agreed!
Yeah, I mean surely the arms would knock over other nearby pieces. And how did the operator know for sure when it was gripping a piece properly.
@@paul8731 He would see his own pieces magnet rods. If the rod didn't fall down when he picked the piece, it meant it hadn't gripped properly. I assume that if the piece fell during a movement or if it knocked another piece in the process, the owner could fix the board and just claim it was the machine not being 100% reliable.
He would also feel the grip by how hard it is to twist further. It's similar to using any tool with a string - you just learn to feel it as extention of yourself with a little practice.
Yeah good points! What a clever idea. I can imagine the excitement when the inventor had the idea and realised all issues were covered. Must have been quite grueling for the operator, with just a candle and a cramped space. They probably got a sore neck from looking at the magnets too. And imagine if they knocked their own replica board by mistake. Oops.
6:55 is the start of the explanation.
In my opinion, the really amazing part is how they recruited so many chess masters to play in the machine and how they managed to keep the secret for so long.
Thank you for sharing the time stamp. For anyone interested, I also leave titled time stamps in the description of each video for those who'd like to skip ahead. And I agree! So many amazing players - I can't imagine that secret would be kept so long had it been touring in recent years.
Lol to be fair though, it's probably because they didn't live in the information age, and so there was no Twitter or tiktok to share and gain clout on
Those chess masters almost certainly made no money playing chess (unlike today with large prizes). So offering them a lot of money was probably a good idea. After all, the audience had to pay to watch.
Like the 18th century version of The Stig
@@ReddwarfIV some say he had cronic back pain....
Fun fact: When Amazon shut down their cashierless stores, it was revealed that it didn't solely run on AI, but heavily relied on outsourced labor, managed by another service which Amazon called "Mechanical Turk"
yeah, they were using Indians, not Turks
@user-cr3ti1vj6f they called it that in reference to the subject of this vid, not because they were using turks
The ironies of late capitalism: first, the company was caught red-handed exploring cheap labour while pretending it was AI. Then, said this information was “misleading and inaccurate”. In the end, they decided to make this a product, with the audacity of ironically naming it after a fake robot from the 1700s. I couldn’t believe this was actually the name. Thanks for the info @GeekIWG.
sir do not redeem
Unfortunately that's not true, the outsourced labor was just as a failsafe in case the algorithm got it wrong. Nearly all of the transactions were recorded without human input
Despite the fact that it was obvious that it was not a real chess machine, the clever tricks to convince the audience that it was, was really the key to this amazing invention 👏
Absolutely!
The smoke from the operator's candle was allowed to escape via the Turk's pipe - ingenious.
Yeah I mean I'm almost more impressed by the mechanism put in place to pull this off than if it was an actual fully automated machine 😂
I don't know what's more impressive, the actual mechanical operation of the whole thing, or the operators/chessmasters inside managing to do their part and never being discovered while also operating the thing correctly.
The funny thing is that Napoleon tried to cheat while playing it, the chess master Coughton wind of it, then destroyed the whole set lol.
And also beating their highly skilled opponents on top of
@@aldrinmilespartosa1578
Deserved. Massive L for a cheater.
As disappointed as I am to find that nobody hundreds of years ago worked out the clockwork to nearly guarantee a win in chess, with a humanoid robot involved, I sure am impressed at the tenacity of the robot's creator in finding so many well-practiced chess-matters to crawl in that box and operate it in such a complex manor!
Honestly though, even a simple chess engine would need to be a huge room of clockwork parts. The transistors used in modern day computers are less than a millionth of the size a clockwork component would need to be.
1700-1800s: We got the turk.
2000s: We got stockfish.
stockfish is a noob martin is the real best chess player
@@wojtekpolska1013 That's propaganda, spread by martin.
Remember Deep Blue?
Wonder if a RTX card could blow Deep Blue out of the water in chess performance.
@@soundsparkRTX card is just the hardware. Graphics cards can't play chess. Software plays chess.
@cetologist You'd think someone would have written an AI model by now to do so.
It's astonishing how none of the chess masters inside the Turk ever made a mistake while switching positions in such a confined space. Although it was evident that something was definitely up, I initially thought it might be remotely controlled by a chess master using some ingenious mechanism. However, upon realizing the Turk was from the 1700s and 1800s, and that the first instance of wireless communication wasn't until 1849, it made sense that wasn't the case. 💀
3:02 why does old art depict kids as just mini adults 😭
I had to stop there to be equally amused and horrified by the drawing
In those days kids were mini adults
Literally just MC Java baby villagers.
... kids were uglier, so they drew mini adults 🤣🤣🤣
they are uglier due to the stress so only the nobles looks like present day children. if you ever go to a third world countries you will notices children looking older than they actually look, some even have wrinkle of a 30 year old.
or maybe the painter can only use adult male as a model since children are as always unruly and impossible to be told to hold still for 30 minutes straight.
It's still impressive that the hidden person managed to beat all the good chess players while sitting in a very cramped and stuffy position. This wouldn't be possible without a highly skilled and patient individual.
Its literally just playing normal chess while taking a little bit more time on each move.
Dang...the board only showed the chess master when pieces had been moved, the chess master had to be able to track which pieces were moved...with only candle light in a cramped space.
Since the starting position of all the pieces was known, it isn’t too bad to keep track. But yeah, if any mistakes were made, it would have been bad.
The inventor Johann Wolfgang von Kempelen (German name)/Ján Vlk Kempelen (Slovak name)/Kempelen Farkas (Hungarian name) was born in Pressburg/Prešporok/Pozsony (DE/AT/HU), then part of the Kingdom of Hungary, today the capital of Slovakia, named Bratislava. It was a multicultural city with ethnic Austrians, Slovaks, Hungarians, Croats and others. Kempelen is famous not only for his Turk, but in Bratislava he created also a water pump and pipes that transported water from the Danube uphill to the castle. He is also the inventor of a mechanical speaking machine and a machine that enabled blind people to write letters. Truly a genius of his time.
As other commenters pointed out, it was kind of expected that the machine was human-operated. There simply was no way to store this amount of information on physical storage at the time.
Your last sentence probably wouldn't even make sense to the people of that time period though
What would they store it on Baghdad hard drives?
@@samholdsworth420 Paper or metal cylinders, like they did for the first automata.
@@cccyanide3034 o yeah lol
Go build me a Sentry
My first instinct was a series of mirrors similar to the Peppers Ghost illusion hiding a person. Such a smart workaround with the candlelight through the machine maneuver
I love that theory. Thanks for sharing and thank you for watching. Good luck in the giveaway.
Imagine being one of those two kids who climbed on the roof, actually DID see someone climb out, you actually DID know how the trick worked...and until the end of your days nobody believes you.
You just know they were telling that story to anyone who would listen!
im still convinced there's a man hiding inside the ATM machine at all times.
Underated😂
💀💀💀
I definitely would have thought it was controlled by a person but I never would have figured out how they were folded into it. Great visualizations as always.
Thanks so much. Glad you enjoyed the video and good luck in the giveaway!
My -20 elo could never 💀
😂
🫂
Rather suspicious that all the doors never remained open all at once… You can never assume something is true later in time arguing it was true before, and this applies to everything, even science!
That's one of the central tenets of magic: misdirection. Having your audience look in spaces that you want them to see, instilling in them a false sense of security that what they see is the real deal or to the doubters, to see the places you know they be seeing instead...
learning basics of magic tricks and playing puzzle video games like Portal (2) taught me how easily I can miss something, even if I am 100% sure there cant be anything important that I could have missed. I think reflecting on that made me much more cautious when accepting "facts" and made me more open to new perspectives and opinions from other people.
I think they actually were and that was why it was so convincing. It was just that the candle door to show that there was nothing behind the mechanism was only done with the right door closed
And yet even Edgar Allen Poe thought the guy was in the dummy.
I'm sure I'd seen another video on The Turk previously, but this was really done and very very well presented. Great video!
Thank you so much - so glad you enjoyed it!
Amazing animations and a fascinating story. It is very impressive how everyone involved kept the secret.
Impressive indeed. Thanks for watching and good luck in the giveaway!
I thought that the player opposing the machine is cooperating with the machine operator and just playing a set of known moves agreed upon before the show. Then, the operator somehow codes a sequence of moves into the Turk's arm with a complicated mechanism. That would probably be too complicated tho :D
It is possible that some of the challengers(the strong chess player) are cooperating with the machine operator to convice the rest that The Turk is unbeatable.
Cool, but when is Chess 2 coming?
If we get chess 2 before gta 6 im gonna explode
It already has, but it's full of DLCs and the campaign isn't as good...
Oat Jenkins made it I think lol
Haha, I love this overused joke (no, I don't 😑).
@@ordinarryalien first
Awesome video man! This was very well explained and detailed. Honestly, I wasn't in any shape or form sure how he could see underneath the objects. But because of this video, You have helped out a ton with the matter. As said before, awesome video. I am not even sure how you only got less than a million subscribers.
This is quite fascinating, i have watched multiple videos on the Chess player Turk but i love how you explain it, simply and without fluff, but you get the point across.
Also great voice.
PS. Could you in the future do a video on Hugo Cabret's Automaton? (if you can)
amazing! I always get invested into these videos after a long day it’s always refreshing to see how stuff from yesterday is explained and shown today.
This story is so good. I love your videos.
So glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for watching and good luck in the giveaway!
Although I already knew the story, you kept me engaged all throughout the video with your amazing storytelling!
Thank you so much! I'm so glad that you enjoyed the video - it means a lot!
I really like Science behind mechanical things especially those things invented in past history like Turk, and this is one of your best video💯!
Thank you so much! I'm so glad you enjoyed it.
Fantastic story telling!
Thank you!
That’s such an awesome mechanism! I honesty guessed that a very thin set of strings were being used to operate the hands from a catwalk or platform above. That little pointer mechanism was definitely my favorite part. Wonder if Carlson will ever volunteer to go inside a remake of this :D
Awesome indeed. Thanks for watching and good luck in the giveaway!
I thought that a person was there under the skin of the turk 👍
Did you see that it is another deeply researched topic that that took so long to be researched we love your videos keep it going
I doubted that it was mechanical, but then a little disappointed that the answer was kind of expected. I wondered if it would be some sort of mechanical computer with pressure plates on the board, but the dangling magnets were a neat idea.
Leonardo Torres Quevedo created in 1912 a legitimate chess playing automaton called "El Ajedrecista". It is an electromechanical device that can only play an endgame of three pieces: one black king, one white king, and a rook...
There is absolutely no way a mechanical computer could've beaten high-skilled players back then. So of course the answer was what you had expected 😊
magicians today do the exact same trick all the time and nobody question them, its part of the show.
To actually be competent at chess the clockwork would have to be insanely huge.
Amazing story telling 😊
Thank you.
Damn I were hoping it was a mechanical magnet-based analogue computer.
After restauration, it uses and actual computer (a Raspberry Pi are enough) and GNU-Chess.
@@vascomanteigas9433 still, I'd be cool if it was for real a mechanical computer from the 18th century. I would blow my mind. Pity the whole thing was just smoke and mirrors.
@@raggedclawstarcraft6562 it would need a ten fold sized Analytical Machines coupled to the Turk to at least resemble the earliest 1950 Computer Chess programs, that was at par on an amateur.
@@vascomanteigas9433 I know. You don't need to tell me. But still it'd be cool if they were come up with something other than a big fraud, basically.
@@raggedclawstarcraft6562 It took until 1967 for a computer to beat a (regular) human opponent and until 1997 for Deep Blue to beat Grandmaster Gary Kasparov. And you thought a mechanical computer somehow could achieve a similar result. LOL Have you ever played chess?
Even though it's not a robot, it's still impressive for the person inside the box to still beat all of those famous people
As soon as the elaborate "look inside these doors and here's a candle thing" I knew there was a person inside. It's still amazing.
The magnet mechanism is so clever!
Agreed!
That's actually impressive to see how they think of all this tricks and mechanics back in the day. Amazing Video!
So glad you enjoyed it. Good luck in the giveaway!
The Turk came right before what is universally considered the Golden Age of magic in Europe. It cleverly uses a lot of principles of modern stage magic. The way the trunk appears to be empty but isn't, for example. No wonder it caused such a stir at the time, it's a great illusion.
I can’t believe such intricate mechanisms existed back then! I had a suspicion that there was an operator inside the Turk, but didn’t know how it would fit in the box.
Honestly I would've thought it had something to do with the floor _below_ the turk
some doors and a sliding chair sounds far more simple lol
really cool Animation and Grafik, wats the programm your using ?
To be able to play well even from inside a box with inconvenient controls is amazing
Agreed! And to be that good and keep it a secret.
Excellent video, I have never seen such good detail and presentation of information as here. I have a theory:
The mechanism inside the box could initially, during its production, remember all the possible moves of the opponent (this explains the large size of the box, which would have stored a bunch of mechanisms for each cell and figure), and when the opponent moved, the position of the mechanism blocked all losing options and selected the best one (by winding up the mechanism on the cage, the location of the opponent’s figure and the Turk’s piece when the mechanism of the cell and the piece came into contact, the losing version of the robot was blocked by the contact of two gears (the cell and the piece), creating a “jamming” of the mechanism of the losing version and starting the backup mechanism (a new move of the Turk) , and then this chess robot continued to work :)
The number of possible legal chess moves is roughly equivalent (within a few orders of magnitude) to the number of water molecules on the Earth. An average grain of sand contains about 5*10^19 atoms. So, if every move was encoded in just one grain of sand, the Turk would need to be larger than the orbit of Jupiter.
Wow, this video was incredible! I had no idea about The Turk not that it's mysterious and fascinating history. It's amazing how it fooled so many people for so long. Great storytelling and really well put together!
Amazing engineering this is. Would’ve been really cool if this was around.
I love chess but i'd never heard of this. What a great video! Cheers from Australia :)
Very impressive for both the machine and the chess masters to be able to play in such condition.
Indeed!
Being a chess fanatic and also a mechanical engineer, I also tried to create something similar in my college days. It revived my college memories.
Thank you for this fantastic video.❤
Very cool! I feel like so many of us share that interest, so I was really looking forward to sharing this one. So glad you enjoyed the video and thanks for watching. Good luck in the giveaway.
I think the most well thought part was the mechanism to hide the chess master
Finally, an animated video which shows the inner working of this magicians chess trick. But where did the smoke and fumes of the candle inside go?
There was a tube that ran up through the Turk's body and carried the smoke out the top of his turban. To cover up the smell of the candle, the presenter always placed a candelabra on the cabinet.
@@primalspace Dude that's insanee, they even hide something so hard like the smoke of the candle, you should have put that in there
That’s definitely a tight fit for all of those chess masters to play hundreds if not thousands of games in😂. Great explanation and video!
I remember reading about this when I was at school, 40 years ago. It's strange the weird bits of information that get stuck in your brain for years.
wtf. The chess masters seeing the magnet move to know what chess piece it is??? Must be very skilled.
So in 90 years, not a single hidden chess master ever sneezed, coughed, needed to go to the loo or bumped against the table? That's amazing.
Definitely had to be an operator, loved this video (signed up for the poster too, we love chess and it would be a brilliant addition to our office!)
So glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for watching and good luck in the giveaway!
Brilliant piece of pick and place mechanism! Genius!
How long would a session usually last? Considering that the hidden chess masters were human and would require (probably multiple) candles to light up the insides, and also stay put until the Turk was in a safehouse before crawling out for a restroom break, is astonishing.
What is interesting was how they kept the light from leaking out for the hidden chess player.
I love this type of old and smart machines. Very creative.
I'm just amazed how the guy thought of all of this.
I first saw the Turk inside of a engineering textbook in high school. As a fan of Chess myself, it seemed to be very impressive. Until I learned that this, was completely human operated, although it was a quite genius.
Amazing, but if the operator accidentally dropped a chess piece and it fell over, how would it get put back? I guess the showmaster would pick it up and put it back to the same square?
Primal space’s videos are amazing!
Thank you. I'm so glad you enjoy them!
Thats amazing, I've always thought that there was a human inside but i didn't know where that person sat
This machine inspired the creation of textile machines, which up until that point were considered impossible to create, a little lie was needed to inspire a future reality
I want that turk poster for my room because it's pretty bare bones rn. Love the content, man ❤
Thank you! So glad you enjoy it. Good luck in the giveaway!
I thought the turk used some sort of an early analog computer and to know the position of the pieces magnets with the help pulleys.
I would love that poster btw
A great guess. Thanks for sharing and for watching, and good luck in the giveaway!
The system was complex for that time engineered nicely, the whole time i was like "who could be this great who can beat everyone easily".
I remember seeing something like this when I was a kid at an antique shop, looked super old, it'd talk and move it's arms, gave me the creeps.
I still think its very impressive how someone plays chess that well under such complicated conditions
Impressive how the huge table was transported to many places and no one noticed. Such a huge box might take time and people to set up and they all kept it a secret
Crazy how that worked, couldn’t have guessed about the two doors trick
Try The masked magician videos. Hiding a person is a lot easier than you think
I suspected there was a chessmaster inside, but I never would have though about the slider and secret door trick!
*"Laughs in opponents' face"*
Ok cheating is one thing, but this... This is getting out of hands xD
I tought about a mechanical computer using magnets to know the information about the position of the pieces on the chess board
Never expected primal space to upload a video about chess
I couldn't help it. I was way too excited about this topic not to share 🤣🤣
I was convinced that it must have been aliens until you explained it at the end.
I remember seeing something about this on The History Channel but at the time it didn't disclose how it operated. It did say it could tell if the opponent was cheating and would knock over the pieces to call out the tomfoolery. I knew it had to do something with magnets, but I'm hella disappointed to find out that it still relied on someone inside to carry out the ruse. I guess the idea of a fully clockwork capable device was beyond the reach of the technology of the time
To be honest I thought someone would just enter the empty space from behind or below after showing the machinery, truly amazing for its time
The craziest thing is that the chess master who was able to beat even the best, chose to pass his fame to a contraption for the sake of the magic trick. Best magic trick ever. Total devotion for the job
I actually thought that someone was hiding there. But cleverly done
How on earth has no chess player ever coughed, sneezed, grunted or made any slight noise in 70 years? They were a few centimeters below their opponents. There is no way no one did not feel that human presence
See one hour later.
Von Kempelen thought of this! First of all, the machine was quite noisy and constantly whirred when in use. This was just a loud clockwork mechanism that Von Kempelen would make a big show of winding up at the start of each game.
Also, the machine was fitted with a device which the operator inside could activate at any time which would trigger a loud twang. This was enough to mask any sound, such as a sneeze, which might give the game away.
I wonder how long it took for the person who operated the Turk to learn how to use the Turk
It was very impressive of the inverter to have thought of this idea and aplouse to all who kept the secret for like a 100 years.
So true. I'm still surprised how long it remained a secret.
That ground news transition 💯
I knew someone was inside but could't figure out where.
it looks very cool to see how it really worked
Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for watching and good luck in the giveaway.
One prevalent theory regarding the operation of the Turk chess machine proposed that it employed a sophisticated system of gears and levers controlled by a series of intricate mechanical movements. Advocates of this hypothesis believed that the machine's outward appearance of autonomy was maintained through a complex network of interconnected mechanisms, meticulously calibrated to analyze chess positions and execute corresponding moves. This theory suggested that the Turk's ability to play chess with such precision and strategy was a testament to the advanced engineering capabilities of its time, showcasing a mastery of mechanical principles that allowed it to simulate human-like intelligence and skill on the chessboard.
I knew that somebody sat inside of the turk , but after you described that it was all opend , i thought maybe Poe was right and somebody dressed as this maniquin
Many 80's robot's where remotely operated but this is really well known :D
great stuff, honestly i thought that it was just someone in a suit
The memory of the chess masters must be insane to remember the locations of all the chess pieces
While it's possible to remember the entire position (blind chess is played even today), in this case the operator had their own set of pieces to move around so they don't have to remember the position.
I knew there was a player under the table but I just couldnt figure out how exactly he would be hidden
no way the bright minds would not have thought of that, i was betting on that trick the moment it said the person closes the other back window before the large front window