Author: Chris Kantack
Date: 19:57:17 07/25/02
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On July 25, 2002 at 09:40:51, Pierre Bourget wrote: > >Could you tell me if the book have gamescores of the Turk ? > >Thanks. > >Pierre While there are some chess positions illustrated and discussed, you won't find annotated games or anything like that in this book. The Turk had many different operators over the years, some of them will never be known. So I'm not sure if game scores or annotated games would be all that meaningful. What's amazing though is that the Turk rarely lost a game. On a trip to America, the Turk went up against the very best of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston--rarely losing a game. (There might be something like 2 losses over a several month period.) Generally speaking, those who presented the Turk always made sure they had an extremely tough chess player operating the unit. This seemed to add to the credibility (for late 18th century and early 19th century audiences) that the machine was indeed playing chess. The belief back then was that any machine that could play chess should be able to play perfect chess. Whenever the Turk lost a game, people became more suspicious about how it was being operated. Of course many people knew the Turk had to be controlled by a human being. How it was actually done didn't come to light until someone bought the Turk and then allowed close inspection (for a fee) to anyone who wanted to learn its secret. Over the years many booklets were written theorizing how it might work. But no one ever got it exactly right. Many speculating on how the Turk worked were way off base. Chris
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