*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 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! 👍
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.
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!
@@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.
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.
They were discovered many times...you are put to death..your family is put to death....for being a video that copy's a subject already completely explored explained and documented. And fails to mention a large portion.... TH-camrs need to to stop stealing topics unless they say everything and involve more than the previous videos do put together... Or people need to stop coming here to reward these lazy people
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.
Not only beating other players but also playing handicaped. You must look at the magnet's above, remember which piece they represent, and operate the mechanical arm while playing good.
Well maybe not quite. After all, there were apparently several chess masters during the second tour, so chances are that was also the case for the first one, meaning that there was no one player that controlled the Turk.
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"
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 👏
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.
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.
sit in a box for a couple of hours every few days and play chess, or spend 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, down the coal mines. The choice is yours. Oh and if you snitch, not only will you be back down the mines, every other chess player in the world who suddenly has no income and has to go back to mining coal will be told who you are.
I mean I image a bunch of nerds who love chess would be totally down for a goofy prank like this. It is still impressive they never told anyone they did it
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.
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.
@@Knokos i wont call it normal chess... that player is playing in a confine space under minimum light, so it's going to be hot and can barely see anything... it's really amazing that player remain unbeatable while playing under those condition...
@@Knokos it s not like normal chess at all. Didn t you follow how he had to follow his opponent s moves? He had to visualize two chess at the same time and remember every piece...
@@unhommequicourt That is a very easy thing to do for a chess master, he literally sees all the moves too, chess masters can visualize a board in their head without even needing to see one so this isnt as impressive as people are making it out to be.
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 remember when they were trumpeting "holograms" being used to recreate "real" Hatsune Miku concerts and "resurrect" Tupac and Wong-Ka-Kui... When, aside from the projectors, the underlying tech predated not only television, but Edison cylinders!
What I find most incredible about Turk's concept is that someone, in the 1700s, already thought about the possibility of creating a machine capable of thinking (playing chess). Even if it was an illusion, it amazes me that people so long ago were already able to consider the concept of AI, and already knew that one day, machines would do anything.
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.
Wissen Sie, es ist lustig, dass Sie das sagen, denn ich habe vor ein paar Tagen angefangen, die geheime Geschichte der Magie von Peter Lamont und Jim Steinmeyer zu lesen. 1 Kapitel heißt Das Goldene Zeitalter der Magie. 😊
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.
The chess master has a full board as well, so he can just replicate the opponent's move exactly on his board. The craziest thing is he saw it from the bottom, which is a mirror. So from his point of view the left side is actually the right side from the players point of view.
The chess master has a full board as well, so he can just replicate the opponent's move exactly on his board. The craziest thing is he saw it from the bottom, which is a mirror. So from his point of view the left side is actually the right side from the players point of view.
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.
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. 💀
I assumed there was a human operator inside, but the issue of how to accurately reproduce a chess match without seeing the board was what stumped me. I had at first guessed that the pieces were marked somehow on their undersides, but that would surely have been spotted at some point.
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.
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.
Your asking about that? With everything this video shows...you still don't understand what you watched? You might be too slow for this video...or platform
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.
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...
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
I’d think people back then knew that, too. Why not leave the doors open so you can watch the mechanism moving? I’d love to watch that! But the fun thing about illusions like this is that, even if you know it’s a trick, you desperately want to know *how precisely* they do it.
@@gf2e Because your filthy European/American air would stain the precise turkish gears! And the more worn down they get the less precise our friend here gets, because although he is the perfect chess machine he's not invincible! So it's important for the intricate (swiss precision? no idea what the equivalent of the time would be) gears be protected when he is thinking and planning in the middle of the match! Aka: a dose of showmanship and misdirection.
Poster....please read Poe's essay on the machine. He DID NOT simply believe the dummy body held an individual: His writing goes to great length to explain how the cabinet was occupied by the manipulator, and by a series of bends & twists deceived the inspecting public during a showing, much as shown at 6:54 .
This is driving me crazy, you show a clip of a newspaper at 1:38 that says "Chess Robot Master". WHEN WAS THIS PAPER PUBLISHED?! Wasn't the word robot coined in the 1920s? Please I have to know!
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.
I appreciate the thumbnail having the answer to the explanation as well as having timestamps to skip ahead, im interested enough to watch the whole thing though this is rlly interesting
So glad you enjoyed watching all the way through. I definitely do what I can to provide context, but also quick answers for everyone who prefers the shorter content haha.
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.
*Excellent video! Remarkable storytelling and animation as always.* I feel that since it's secrets were revealed years after it was destroyed in the fire, it might be inaccurate or simplistic. For example, precise gripping of the pieces and moving it to the new location would have required something more complicated than what was shown. The precision required to move without touching any other piece is the hard part. Secondly, I imagine there would be more levers to move the head and the other hand. Thirdly, that candle presented a risk of light leakage through any of the panels or tiny holes. And if it is well sealed, it requires oxygen to burn. So, some venting is required. Overall impressed it was able to keep the secret despite having so many people involved over the 90 years. *Suggestion* - Titling this as a "The Robot Chess Player Scam" is doing a dis-service to this masterpiece. Magic is not scam. Also, revealing the secret in the thumbnail showing a man inside is also not a good idea. A better title would be "Chess playing Robot of 1700s" And thumbnail showing the robot with words "Beats champions"
As for ventilation, you could have a nice chimney effect going. Air going in through the floor (invisible to audience), going out through the puppet (plenty of ways to hide it - ears, nostrils, mouth, maybe hide something in the turban as well). Manipulation of the pieces - wouldn't coating the fingers with rubber be enough ? It was already known in 1770. The magnets then help with precise centering of the piece once put down.
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.
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.
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)
Awesome video! Loved how you broke down the robot chess player scam. The historical context and your storytelling made it super interesting and easy to follow. Great job with the research too.
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...
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
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.
0:52 My sibling in Christ you are off by almost 4 decades. At that time Maria Theresa was the Dowager *Holy Roman Empress* and *Archduchess* of Austria. Her husband, Holy Roman Emperor Francis I had passed away in 1765 and the land she ruled as sovereign was not yet an empire. That did not happen until the rule of her grandson.
That was a great video. The editing style is really cool and when explaining how the turk worked the visuals helped a lot. I tought it was just someone who was really good at being a robot inside the turks body.
Sorry but I can’t understand one thing. At (5:16) you put 1826 and in the next frame napoleon, like how??🤣 Napoleon died in st elen in 1821, after he was exiled in 1815
@@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.
@@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?
Its incredible that 300 years ago we thought a machine was a fake just because it was impossible to beat human intelligence, nowadays we would be surprised of humans beating machines...
If you knew how the machine worked, you could hypothetically defeat the chess master by being indecisive and picking and dropping random pieces. You'd cause enough confusion that he would lose track of which piece is where if you did it correctly.
@@primalspace Oh, I don't mean you should drop them like that. I mean that you could simply pick up each piece and place them back down over and over to potentially disguise your move. It's a bit of a stretch, but could work.
@@Handles_AreStupid touch move rule in chess states that u have to move a piece that you touched or say "I adjust" to your opponent if you are adjusting the position of a piece on a tile
I worked in the carnival industry for many years. Smoke, mirrors, and hidden compartments are an integral part of side shows. Bravo to the guy that plays chess basically blind and from an upside down board.
LOL I read _The Turk_ when it first came out, and the author managed to keep me wondering until nearly the end. And this video's thumbnail gives it away at the get-go. WOW talk about spoiling a great story!!!
For any viewers who are less interested in the context of the topic, time stamps with relevant chapter titles are always provided in the description. Shorts are also available here on the channel for a quick overview. I hope that helps! Thanks so much for watching.
I think the Mechanical Turk was powered by a network of trained birds, each one tasked with remembering and signalling different chess moves. Through a series of tiny, secret openings, they would relay their decisions to make the Turk appear like a genius automaton. It’s a whimsical twist on the idea of hidden human operators!
I remember seeing the Turk for the first time. It was amazing we all stood there in amazement over this machine.........uh oh....I've said too much I must go now.
Nice video! I legit thought the guy who made the machine was using magnets to move the chess pieces around somehow standing away from the machine taking inspiration from the performance in the beginning about magnets.
*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
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.
Honestly, it is impressive how a chess master would be able to reliably win in such uncomfortable conditions.
Agreed completely!
Perhaps they had a strategy book in there with them.
Paul Morphy would've stomped them so bad, if he was given the chance to sit inside the Turk and make his moves.
@@ArranVid imagine ure inside the turk and when ur opponent enters the room it's paul morphy
@@kerkertrandov459 That would be badass!!!
You know it’s a good trick when after it’s explained to you, you’re still impressed.
especially, after so much time.
Astonishing how Wikipedia and many book I've read weren't crystal clear on the mechanism of The Turk, yet your video unveiled the mystery, amazing
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.
They were discovered many times...you are put to death..your family is put to death....for being a video that copy's a subject already completely explored explained and documented. And fails to mention a large portion....
TH-camrs need to to stop stealing topics unless they say everything and involve more than the previous videos do put together...
Or people need to stop coming here to reward these lazy people
@@jamesmeppler6375what
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.
Not only beating other players but also playing handicaped. You must look at the magnet's above, remember which piece they represent, and operate the mechanical arm while playing good.
Well maybe not quite. After all, there were apparently several chess masters during the second tour, so chances are that was also the case for the first one, meaning that there was no one player that controlled the Turk.
imagine being too good at chess that you got to get locked up inside a box just to challenge famous & smart opponents
It revealed the person who play it was Soldier lost both leg by canon fire in war and this how he made a living .
@@goblincomic4522 wait a sec how do you know that google search can not find result
What I find more impressive is that several chessmasters have agreed to work under such uncomfortable conditions, won anyway, and took no credit.
I'm sure they did get paid very well to operate The Turk
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
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
@@Benetheburrito says who? Amazon? 😂
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 😂
The same is true for most magic tricks. It takes a good salesman to make the tricks look like magic.
Yes
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!
"the end of their days" is a bit of an exaggeration, the truth was confirmed 30 years later. and it probably didnt torment them at all lmao
@@oniondesu963330 years is a long time for no one to believe you
If it happened in this day and age, those kids would be called “conspiracy theorists”
@@Louis13XIII If it happened today there'd be TH-cam video of it.
Notice how batman and the unknown chess master were never in the same room.......
🤣🤣🤣
People using bots to play good chess while this robot using people for it
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.
sit in a box for a couple of hours every few days and play chess, or spend 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, down the coal mines. The choice is yours. Oh and if you snitch, not only will you be back down the mines, every other chess player in the world who suddenly has no income and has to go back to mining coal will be told who you are.
I mean I image a bunch of nerds who love chess would be totally down for a goofy prank like this. It is still impressive they never told anyone they did it
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!
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.
"We're losing to a mechanical chess robot, what do we do?"
"There's nothing we can do."
This needs to be a movie.
The prestige?
im still convinced there's a man hiding inside the ATM machine at all times.
Underated😂
💀💀💀
Nah, I saw some bank official refills money to ATM machine, no human inside of it.
"that mr bean episode"
@@harsdensus88 Spoiler
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.
@@Knokos i wont call it normal chess... that player is playing in a confine space under minimum light, so it's going to be hot and can barely see anything... it's really amazing that player remain unbeatable while playing under those condition...
@@zerocalvin It wasnt unbeatable, it was mostly unbeatable, it did still lose.
@@Knokos it s not like normal chess at all. Didn t you follow how he had to follow his opponent s moves? He had to visualize two chess at the same time and remember every piece...
@@unhommequicourt That is a very easy thing to do for a chess master, he literally sees all the moves too, chess masters can visualize a board in their head without even needing to see one so this isnt as impressive as people are making it out to be.
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.
I remember when they were trumpeting "holograms" being used to recreate "real" Hatsune Miku concerts and "resurrect" Tupac and Wong-Ka-Kui...
When, aside from the projectors, the underlying tech predated not only television, but Edison cylinders!
Imagine being a man in the machine and trying not to sneeze
Haha right? I'm sure there were at least a few close calls.
AH AH AAAAAHCHOOOOOOOO OH SHIT 😅😅😅😅😅
"Did..did the Turk's box just fart...?"
"No. Shut up"
What I find most incredible about Turk's concept is that someone, in the 1700s, already thought about the possibility of creating a machine capable of thinking (playing chess). Even if it was an illusion, it amazes me that people so long ago were already able to consider the concept of AI, and already knew that one day, machines would do anything.
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.
Wissen Sie, es ist lustig, dass Sie das sagen, denn ich habe vor ein paar Tagen angefangen, die geheime Geschichte der Magie von Peter Lamont und Jim Steinmeyer zu lesen. 1 Kapitel heißt Das Goldene Zeitalter der Magie. 😊
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.
Not really, many chess masters, international masters and grandmasters can do that.
@@ArranVidwhen have people nowadays EVER played under those conditions? You're so full of shit it hurts 😂
One cough and it's over
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 chess master has a full board as well, so he can just replicate the opponent's move exactly on his board.
The craziest thing is he saw it from the bottom, which is a mirror. So from his point of view the left side is actually the right side from the players point of view.
The chess master has a full board as well, so he can just replicate the opponent's move exactly on his board.
The craziest thing is he saw it from the bottom, which is a mirror. So from his point of view the left side is actually the right side from the players point of view.
I had expected that the pieces had pins poking through the board to let the operator below keep track of the positions
@KenZzZ86 it didn't had any mirrors. The board was the same possition both from the puppet and his board.
9:28 my name is marco but i spell it with a k.. i legit jumped out of my seat for a moment there lol
Lol
I gotta admit, even thou I i was sure it's not a pure machine, its mechanical abilities are still very astonishing.
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.
also his name was wolfgang and that's gangster as hell
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. 💀
What was the first instance of wireless communication
@@mladizivkoWhen Heinrich Hertz demonstrated the propagation and transmission of electromagnetic waves through space
I assumed there was a human operator inside, but the issue of how to accurately reproduce a chess match without seeing the board was what stumped me. I had at first guessed that the pieces were marked somehow on their undersides, but that would surely have been spotted at some point.
Inside the Turk 💀
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
Surely someone yelled "now leave the damn box open! And play" 😂
Awesome breakdown! Such genius minds.
As soon as it specified that the showman would open one door, close it, and then open the next, I knew there was someone inside that just moved around
Well duh. At that point, it was already blatantly obvious.
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
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!
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.
8:58 How do we know that these people operated the Turk?
Wait, how does the Turk laugh? 00:10
Probably a hideous laugh
I don't think it actually laughed, it just pantomimed a laugh by moving its head
Your asking about that? With everything this video shows...you still don't understand what you watched? You might be too slow for this video...or platform
@@jamesmeppler6375what?
@@jamesmeppler6375ANSWER THE QUESTION
The magnet mechanism is so clever!
Agreed!
I think the magnets are the most ingenious part of it. Much better than a periscope hidden somewhere.
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
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...
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’d think people back then knew that, too. Why not leave the doors open so you can watch the mechanism moving? I’d love to watch that!
But the fun thing about illusions like this is that, even if you know it’s a trick, you desperately want to know *how precisely* they do it.
@@gf2e Because your filthy European/American air would stain the precise turkish gears! And the more worn down they get the less precise our friend here gets, because although he is the perfect chess machine he's not invincible! So it's important for the intricate (swiss precision? no idea what the equivalent of the time would be) gears be protected when he is thinking and planning in the middle of the match!
Aka: a dose of showmanship and misdirection.
Poster....please read Poe's essay on the machine. He DID NOT simply believe the dummy body held an individual: His writing goes to great length to explain how the cabinet was occupied by the manipulator, and by a series of bends & twists deceived the inspecting public during a showing, much as shown at 6:54 .
This is driving me crazy, you show a clip of a newspaper at 1:38 that says "Chess Robot Master". WHEN WAS THIS PAPER PUBLISHED?! Wasn't the word robot coined in the 1920s? Please I have to know!
it is his in edit not in newspaper man
"robot" comes from slavic, and means slavery work (in russian sometimes normal work). It was used in the middle age.
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.
Yeah but it would've been hard to believe that Napoleon and Ben Franklin were also in on it lol
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!
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.
I appreciate the thumbnail having the answer to the explanation as well as having timestamps to skip ahead, im interested enough to watch the whole thing though this is rlly interesting
So glad you enjoyed watching all the way through. I definitely do what I can to provide context, but also quick answers for everyone who prefers the shorter content haha.
This is one of the most interesting videos I see in the last 5 years, i am not joking.
My -20 elo could never 💀
😂
🫂
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 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.
Unless he sneezed which would be a dead giveaway 😂😂😂😂😂😂
*Excellent video! Remarkable storytelling and animation as always.*
I feel that since it's secrets were revealed years after it was destroyed in the fire, it might be inaccurate or simplistic. For example, precise gripping of the pieces and moving it to the new location would have required something more complicated than what was shown. The precision required to move without touching any other piece is the hard part.
Secondly, I imagine there would be more levers to move the head and the other hand.
Thirdly, that candle presented a risk of light leakage through any of the panels or tiny holes. And if it is well sealed, it requires oxygen to burn. So, some venting is required.
Overall impressed it was able to keep the secret despite having so many people involved over the 90 years.
*Suggestion* - Titling this as a "The Robot Chess Player Scam" is doing a dis-service to this masterpiece. Magic is not scam. Also, revealing the secret in the thumbnail showing a man inside is also not a good idea. A better title would be "Chess playing Robot of 1700s" And thumbnail showing the robot with words "Beats champions"
As for ventilation, you could have a nice chimney effect going. Air going in through the floor (invisible to audience), going out through the puppet (plenty of ways to hide it - ears, nostrils, mouth, maybe hide something in the turban as well).
Manipulation of the pieces - wouldn't coating the fingers with rubber be enough ? It was already known in 1770. The magnets then help with precise centering of the piece once put down.
Poor the brilliant chest master inside the machine, which maybe would never get credit in the history 😢
Until this video when the TH-camr literally listed a bunch of the names
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.
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.
Wondering the same thing
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)
Audience member - "Open both doors at the same time"
'What causes pip in poulltry...'
Awesome video! Loved how you broke down the robot chess player scam. The historical context and your storytelling made it super interesting and easy to follow. Great job with the research too.
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.
Fantastic story telling!
Thank you!
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.
Napoleon was probably like, "There's nothing we can do..." 😂😂
5:08 to skip add
Thanks!!
They really snuck that in there, never saw it coming
🙏
Amazing story telling 😊
Thank you.
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.
That was EXACTLY my thought!
0:52 My sibling in Christ you are off by almost 4 decades. At that time Maria Theresa was the Dowager *Holy Roman Empress* and *Archduchess* of Austria. Her husband, Holy Roman Emperor Francis I had passed away in 1765 and the land she ruled as sovereign was not yet an empire. That did not happen until the rule of her grandson.
3:40 bro in heaven was like: IS MY ROBOT ACTUALY ANT TO GET CANCELLED BY BORING BOYS
That was a great video. The editing style is really cool and when explaining how the turk worked the visuals helped a lot. I tought it was just someone who was really good at being a robot inside the turks body.
This story is so good. I love your videos.
So glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for watching and good luck in the giveaway!
Sorry but I can’t understand one thing. At (5:16) you put 1826 and in the next frame napoleon, like how??🤣 Napoleon died in st elen in 1821, after he was exiled in 1815
He corrected it bro
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?
3:03 the drawing of the “small child” is weirdly hilarious
Interesting story and very well told. Thank you
And thank you for watching. So glad you enjoyed it.
I thought that a person was there under the skin of the turk 👍
Amazing engineering this is. Would’ve been really cool if this was around.
Imagine that you are a chess master, but no one knows you because you are inside a machine.
Why couldn't they play chess outside of the machine?
This story deserves a Movie man .
Its incredible that 300 years ago we thought a machine was a fake just because it was impossible to beat human intelligence, nowadays we would be surprised of humans beating machines...
If you knew how the machine worked, you could hypothetically defeat the chess master by being indecisive and picking and dropping random pieces. You'd cause enough confusion that he would lose track of which piece is where if you did it correctly.
If a piece fell, the presenter would be there to pick it up and put it in the right place.
@@primalspace Oh, I don't mean you should drop them like that. I mean that you could simply pick up each piece and place them back down over and over to potentially disguise your move. It's a bit of a stretch, but could work.
@@Handles_AreStupid touch move rule in chess states that u have to move a piece that you touched or say "I adjust" to your opponent if you are adjusting the position of a piece on a tile
@@sweepyspud That might be tournament rules, but this "robot" was designed to play against the general public.
@@Handles_AreStupid That doesn't change anything
0:20 “There’s nothing we can do” -Napoleon Bonaparte
0:15 why is this hat is so big
I worked in the carnival industry for many years. Smoke, mirrors, and hidden compartments are an integral part of side shows. Bravo to the guy that plays chess basically blind and from an upside down board.
Bravo indeed! Quite the talent.
That was a smooth, coherent, well placed and well thought transition to sponsor. Kudos
And the entire plan relied on that one candle…
Napoleon Bonaparte was chess master!?!?!?!?!?!
Wow a emperor, master of artillery, commander and chess master nice
Just like most commander or any nobility or any higher ups
I'd heard about this many times was always interested how it works. Your video made it so clear. Very cool. Thank you.
Fascinating video. New sub!
So glad you enjoyed it. Welcome to the channel!
5:10 this is after the sponsor so you dont have to watch it
Back in the day when the news outlets were actually worried about journalistic integrity.
5:20 napoelon bonaprte?
it had to be Bonaprte, because in 1826 Bonaparte had been dead for 5 years
@@JustinekFilms He explained that in the pinned comment.
LOL I read _The Turk_ when it first came out, and the author managed to keep me wondering until nearly the end. And this video's thumbnail gives it away at the get-go. WOW talk about spoiling a great story!!!
i have never seen a better ground news segue in my life
Real Video starts in 06:57
For any viewers who are less interested in the context of the topic, time stamps with relevant chapter titles are always provided in the description. Shorts are also available here on the channel for a quick overview. I hope that helps! Thanks so much for watching.
I WAS ABOUT TO PUT THAT COMMENT TOO !!! lol what a long introduction
@@primalspaceyes, no problem with the introduction, it just felt a little longer than expectation.
IBM's Deep Blue (chess computer) be like: "Nice try great grandpa, but ya sxxx ain't gonna be as good as me these days. >:)"
😃
I think the Mechanical Turk was powered by a network of trained birds, each one tasked with remembering and signalling different chess moves. Through a series of tiny, secret openings, they would relay their decisions to make the Turk appear like a genius automaton. It’s a whimsical twist on the idea of hidden human operators!
I remember seeing the Turk for the first time. It was amazing we all stood there in amazement over this machine.........uh oh....I've said too much I must go now.
Nice video! I legit thought the guy who made the machine was using magnets to move the chess pieces around somehow standing away from the machine taking inspiration from the performance in the beginning about magnets.
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