The Mechanical Turk Automaton

Novels

The Turk has also inspired works of literary fiction. In 1849, just several years before the Turk was destroyed, Edgar Allan Poe published a tale "Von Kempelen and His Discovery".[79] Ambrose Bierce's short story "Moxon's Master", published in 1909, is a morbid tale about a chess-playing automaton that resembles the Turk. In 1938, John Dickson Carr published The Crooked Hinge,[80] a locked room mystery in his line of Dr. Gideon Fell detective novels. Among the puzzles presented included an automaton that operates in a way that is unexplainable to the characters.[81] Gene Wolfe's 1977 science fiction short story, "The Marvellous Brass Chessplaying Automaton", also features a device very similar to the Turk.[82] F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre's 2007 story "The Clockwork Horror" reconstructs Edgar Allan Poe's original encounter with Maelzel's Chess-Player, and also establishes (from contemporary advertisements in a Richmond newspaper) precisely when and where this encounter took place.[83] Robert Löhr's 2005 book "Der Schachautomat" (translated in 2007 by Anthea Bell as "The Secrets of the Chess Machine") is a fictional account of the origins of the mechanical turk featuring a chess playing dwarf.
[edit] Internet equivalents

In 2005, Amazon.com launched the Amazon Mechanical Turk. The web-based software application coordinates programming tasks with human intelligence, inspired in part by the way Kempelen's Turk operated.[84] The program, still in beta, is designed to have humans perform tasks, such as color comparisons, that computers struggle with.[85]