Sunday, August 1, 2021

The Mechanical Turk, Ajeeb, and Mephisto

 


The chess playing automatons. And hoaxes. Edgar Allan Poe was involved with exposing the Turk, the most famous. Mephisto did not have a human player inside, but was controlled remotely. Eventually a device was built which could actually play chess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/debunking-mechanical-turk-helped-set-edgar-allan-poe-path-mystery-writing-180964059/

https://www.history.com/news/how-a-phony-18th-century-chess-robot-fooled-the-world


Ajeeb the Wonderful - 1886.




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mephisto_(automaton)

http://chessforallages.blogspot.com/2018/03/mephistogunsberg-cdv.html

Second link is auction price for image above. A listing of top chess-related auction prices. Ricky Jay had a bunch of that kind of thing in his collection, and I have his book of Jay's Journal of Anomalies, which has a chapter on the Turk.

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