Book Review: The Mechanical Turk, by Tom Standage

This was an alright read. The book tells the story of the chess-playing automaton built in the late 18th century and its journeys across Europe and America from the late 18th century to the early 19th century. The automaton itself I didn't find too interesting but the characters it meets in its lifetime – from the analysts trying to crack its mystery to the engineers it would inspire – I found captivating. The author doesn't divulge the secret of how the automaton works until the penultimate chapter but I'll confess I jumped straight to the back after reading a few chapters because the suspense was killing me!

Here are some quotes from the book:

"... Babbage soon came to the conclusion that there was no reason why a mechanical device made of simple parts could not perform complex calculations. He was so excited at the prospect that it made him ill; his doctor advised him to take a holiday and not think about such things, so he went to stay with Herschel near Windsor for a few days. He subsequently drew up a scientific paper in which he announced that he was designing a machine capable of calculating any mathematical tables, including astronomical ones, automatically. This was the genesis of Babbage's first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine..."

"... Babbage struggled in vain for many years and spent the fortune he inherited from his father, along with a vast quantity of government funds, in an unsuccessful attempt to build this machine (the Difference Engine). Part of the reason why he failed was that halfway through construction, Babbage conceived an even more ambitious machine, the Analytical Engine, which would be capable of far more complex calculations..."

"... Such was the complexity of this new machine (the Analytical Engine) that it was inarguably the earliest ancestor of the modern digital computer: it had direct mechanical equivalents of a modern computer's processor and memory. Babbage even devised a symbolic notation with which to write down programs for it. But following the failure of the Difference Engine, he was unable to raise the funds to build it. Even so, his analysis of the Analytical Engine's theoretical capabilities prefigured many elements of modern computer science..."

"... 'You Americans are a very singular people,' Maelzel later recalled to one of this friends. 'I went with my automaton all over my own country – the Germans wondered and said nothing. In France, they exclaimed, 'Magnifique! Merveilleux! Superbe!' The English set themselves to prove – one that it could be, and another that it could not be, a mere mechanism acting without a man inside. But I had not been long in your country, before a Yankee came to me and said, 'Mr Maelzel, would you like another like that? I can make you one for five hundred dollars.' I laughed at his proposition. A few months afterwards, the same Yankee came to see me again, and this time he said 'Mr Maelzel, would you like to buy another thing like that? I have one ready for you.'..."

"... the illusion of intelligence is as good as the real thing..."

"... in 1769 Kempelen had conjectured that playing chess and holding conversations were the two activities that most readily indicated intelligence. Nearly 200 years later, the computer scientists of the twentieth century came to exactly the same conclusion..."