The Turk or Automaton Chess Player was a chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century, and exhibited from 1770 for over 84 years, by various owners, as an automaton but later explained in the early 1820s as an elaborate hoax. Constructed and unveiled in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734–1804) to impress the Empress Maria Theresa, the mechanism appeared to be able to play a strong game of chess against a human opponent, as well as perform the knight’s tour, a puzzle that requires the player to move a knight to occupy every square of a chessboard once and only once.
Publicly promoted as an automaton and given its common name based on its appearance, the Turk was in fact a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the machine. With a skilled operator, the Turk won most of the games played during its demonstrations around Europe and the Americas for nearly 84 years until its destruction by fire in 1854, playing and defeating many challengers including statesmen such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Although many had suspected the hidden human operator, the hoax was initially revealed only in the 1820s by the Londoner Robert Willis (see, for instance, his An Attempt to Analyse the Automaton Chess Player, London, 1821).
Source: Wikipedia
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Mechanical Turk Blog Results
- LUCI Blog: Tukopticon, Six and Lilly make O'Reilly's Blog
(Or as someone at the meetup wryly suggested, turk is a Remote Person Call.) The last pair of speakers, Lilly Irani and Six Silberman, reminded us that behind mechanical turk lies thousands of workers† (“the crowd in the cloud”) working … Read more - Dolores Labs Blog » Bing is an Improvement over Live, but Still …
We took 100 random real-world queries and showed their results from each engine to workers on Mechanical Turk. For a single query, we showed the results from two engines side-by-side and asked workers to judge which result set was … Read more - Mechanical Turk changes how we understand labor « Bumblebee Labs Blog
You load up the app, snap a picture of an object, Amazon will use Mechanical Turk to find the closest Amazon equivalent and, within about 5 minutes, you can buy it for one click. The application itself was a beautiful usage of …Read more - In name and blood – Mechanical Turk
Try Mechanical Turk. Employers post simple tasks for simple money. Usually simple things like surveys or proofreading, but it depends on the employer. Some tasks pay as much as 10bucks an hour. There are no benefits, but the hours are … Read more - Got a Minute? Set Some Government Data Free With TransparencyCorps
Unlike Mechanical Turk, where there are scads of workers because they get paid small sums, TransparencyCorps volunteers are unpaid. Promotion will no doubt be the site’s biggest challenge. If ease of use can be maximized and some … Read more - Mechanical Turk Best Practices – O'Reilly Radar
Last night, Dolores Labs hosted what was billed as the first-ever Mechanical Turk meetup, and I was fortunate enough to have been able to squeeze into what turned out to be a great series of presentations. While Amazon was the pioneer … Read more
Mechanical Turk Videos
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