Poe, the Turk, and Artificial Intelligence

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Could a machine actually defeat a human being in chess?

Before you ask me where I've been for the last two decades, I should frame this question a little differently.

Could a machine actually defeat a human being in chess in 1836?

That's the question raised by "The Turk," a mechanical contrivance that created a sensation back in the early 1800s when a man named Johann Maelzel demonstrated it for audiences in Europe and the United States.

Introduced back in late eighteenth century, the Turk took on countless humans, including a few whose names will be familiar to you — namely Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin.  (It won both of these matches and many others.)

Another genius came into the picture in the nineteenth century, this time not to defeat the Turk in chess, but to determine its very nature.  This genius is also familiar to you.  His name was Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe's real competitor in this battle of wits was not the Turk itself, but inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen and promoter Maelzel, who both had passed off the Turk as an early form of artificial intelligence.

Unlike Napoleon and Franklin, Poe won his match.

What's Inside?

The challenge that lay before Poe was the question of how something that appeared to be a mere machine could play chess well enough to defeat a human (never mind how it could play chess at all). 

I have chosen my words carefully here.  I wrote "something that appeared to be a mere machine" because it was, of course, possible that the apparent machine was not a mere machine at all — that is, not something operating without human guidance. 

In article published in 1836 in The Southern Literary Messenger, where he was working as an editor, Poe zeroed in on specific aspects of the cabinet underneath the Turk, making the case that a human being could hide in the cabinet and operate the Turk from within, making it seem that the machine was working independently.  Poe was right, although it's worth noting that he was not the first to make this case.  Indeed, in his essay, Poe mentions some of the earlier arguments for a human hiding in the box.

In addition to dissecting the cabinet to show how a human could hide within it, Poe pointed to the presence and absence of a man named Schlumberger, who accompanied Maelzel.  In short, this man and the active Turk were never seen in the same place at the same time — suspicious indeed.

Poe's explanation is interesting in its own right.  Who among us has not wondered how a magician pulled off a seemingly impossible trick?  The Turk was essentially an elaborate magician's trick, and Poe was seeking to let us in on the trick.

The article is noteworthy in another respect, as well.  In his excellent book The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder, Daniel Stashower argues that Poe's article about the Turk shows the author's early dabbling with deduction, which would become central to his development of detective fiction.

I would argue that there is a yet another reason to reflect on the article, one with much broader implications.

Thinking about Thought

In his essay, Poe writes at some length about the question of thought, a timely topic for us today in the age of "artificial intelligence," whatever that exactly is.

One could argue that AI goes back to Poe's day, though not to the Turk.  Indeed, Poe explicitly refers to "the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage" — that is, an early computer invented by Charles Babbage in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Poe is careful to make a distinction between what Babbage's machine did and what the Turk supposedly did, explaining that the former involves a far simpler, more direct form of "thinking":

This being the case, we can without difficulty conceive the possibility of so arranging a piece of mechanism, that upon starting it in accordance with the data of the question to be solved, it should continue its movements regularly, progressively, and undeviatingly towards the required solution, since these movements, however complex, are never imagined to be otherwise than finite and determinate.

In short, Babbage's machine, given some numbers, could conduct operations that would lead to a mathematical conclusion.  It didn't have to make any decisions.  Poe continues:

But the case is widely different with the Chess-Player. With him there is no determinate progression. No one move in chess necessarily follows upon any one other. From no particular disposition of the men at one period of a game can we predicate their disposition at a different period.

Given the state of technology in 1836, Poe correctly concluded that no machine could do what the Turk supposedly was doing.  He confidently states: "It is quite certain that the operations of the Automaton are regulated by mind, and by nothing else."

Poe knew that "mind" was something that existed inside human skulls, not in mechanical contrivances.

Leave it to Poe to put his own mind to work to think about thought.  More than any other writer I have studied, Poe was highly attentive and deliberate when it came to matters of the mind.  He celebrated phrenology, the now discredited theory of mental geography, writing, "Phrenology is no longer to be laughed at. ... It has assumed the majesty of a science."  He also wrote again and again, sometimes explicitly (in "The Black Cat" and "The Imp of the Perverse," for example) and other times implicitly (in "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Raven," and other works), about the workings of the human mind.  His detective fiction was designed as a kind of intellectual exercise.  In one of these stories, "The Purloined Letter," he even presents a miniature dissertation on the values of different modes of thought, including mathematical reasoning.

Indeed, I am convinced that Poe had an extraordinary understanding of the right cerebral hemisphere, or "right brain," and I have written extensively about the role of this mental region in his work and even his life.  (For more on this point, see "2 Sides of Poe's Brain," posted here on Mind Inclined on October 26, 2024.)

Poe's love for thought was part of larger love of (and fascination with) the human experience.  Thought, after all, is central to this experience.  Many of us would argue that it is what makes us human — that is, different from the other living things around us.

When you think about it this way, distinguishing between humans and machines becomes all the more important.  It's not merely a matter of the functionality of machines, but it's an existential question about identity and values. 

Next week, we will pursue this question a little further with some reflection on the uses and roles of AI and other forms of technology — from taking notes on a meeting to calling balls and strikes.