Our Hunger
for Beauty
Chess and 18th Century artificial intelligence
An 18th Century automaton that could
beat human chess opponents seemingly marked the arrival of artificial
intelligence. But what turned out to be an elaborate hoax had its own sense of
genius, says Adam Gopnik.
Lately I've been thinking a lot
about the Turk. That sounds, I know, like a very 19th Century remark. "Have
you been thinking about the Turk?" one bearded British statesman might
have asked another in the 1860s, with an eye to the Sublime Porte and Russian
designs on it, and all the rest.
No, The Turk I have in mind is both
older and newer than that - I mean the famous 18th Century chess-playing
automaton, recently and brilliantly reconstructed in
If you haven't heard of it before, I
should explain what the Turk is, or was. There's a very good book by Tom Standage all about it. The Turk first appeared in
The thing was a sensation.
Before it was destroyed by fire in
I should rush to say that, of
course, the thing was a fraud, or rather, a trick - a clever magician's
illusion. A sliding sled on well-lubricated casters had been fitted inside the
lower cabinet and the only real ingenuity was that this let a hidden chess
player glide easily, and silently, into a prone position inside. There was just
a lot more room to hide in the cabinet than all that clockwork machinery
suggested.
Now, the Turk fascinates me for
several reasons. First, because it displays an odd, haunting hole in human
reasoning. Common sense should have told the people who watched and challenged
it that for the Turk to have really been a chess-playing machine, it would have
had to have been the latest in a long sequence of such machines. For there to
be a mechanical Turk who played chess, there would have had to have been, 10
years before, a mechanical Greek who played checkers.
It's true that the late 18th Century
was a great age of automatons, machines that could make programmed looms weave
and mechanical birds sing - although always the same song, or tapestry, over
and over. But the deeper truth that chess-playing was an entirely different
kind of creative activity seemed as obscure to them as it seems obvious to us
now.
But in large part, I think people
were fooled because they were looking, as we always seem to do, for the
beautiful and elegant solution to a problem, even when the cynical and ugly one
is right.
The great-grandfather of computer
science, Charles Babbage, saw the Turk and though he realised that it was
probably a magic trick, he also asked himself what exactly would be required to
produce a beautiful solution. What kind of machine would you need to build if
you could build a machine to play chess? And his "difference engine"
- the first computer - rose in part from his desire to believe that there was a
beautiful solution to the problem, even if the one before him was not it.
We always want not just the right
solution to a mystery, we want a beautiful solution. And when we meet a
mysterious thing, we are always inclined to believe that it must therefore
conceal an inner beauty. When we see an impregnable tower, we immediately are
sure that there must be a princess inside.
Doubtless there are many things that
seem obscure to us - the origins of the universe, the nature of consciousness,
the possibility of time travel - that will seem obvious in the future. But the
solutions to their obscurity, too, will undoubtedly be clunky and ugly and more
ingenious than sublime. The solution to the problem of consciousness will
involve, so to speak, sliding sleds and hidden chess players.
But there is another aspect of the
thing that haunts me, too. Though some sought a beautiful solution when a
cynical one was called for, plenty of people - Edgar Allen Poe for instance -
realised that the Turk had to be, must be, a cabinet with a chess player
inside. What seem to have stumped these people was not the ugliness of the
solution, but the singularity of the implied chess player. Where would you find
a midget chess genius that could fit, they wondered. Or could the operator be
using fiendishly well-trained children? Even if you accepted the idea of an
adult player, who could it be, this hidden inscrutable master?
It turns out that the chess players
who operated the Turk from inside were just chess players, an ever-changing
sequence of strong but not star players, who needed the work badly enough to be
willing to spend a week or a month inside its smoky innards. Maelzel picked up chess players on the run, wherever he
happened to be, as Chuck Berry used to hire back-up bands on the road. So the
inventor's real genius was not to build a chess-playing machine. It was to be
the first to notice that, in the modern world, there is more mastery available
than you might think; that exceptional talent is usually available, and will
often work cheap.
And there lies what I think of now
as the asymmetry of mastery - the mystery of mastery, a truth that is for some
reason extremely hard for us to grasp. We overrate masters and underrate
mastery. That simplest solution was the hardest, partly because they
under-estimated the space inside the cabinet, but also because they
over-estimated just how good the chess-player had to be.
We always over-estimate the space
between the uniquely good and the very good. That inept footballer we whistle
at in despair is a better football player than we have ever seen or ever will
meet.
The few people who do grasp that
though there are only a few absolute masters, there are many, many masters
right below them looking for work tend, like Maelzel,
to profit greatly from it. The greatest managers in any sport are those who
know you can stand down the talent, and find more to fill the bench. It is the
manager who is willing to bench Beckham, rather than he who worships his bend,
who tends to have the most sporting success.
And what of the handful of true,
undisputed, top masters? What makes the unique virtuoso unique is, in truth,
rarely virtuosity as we have defined it, but instead some strange idiosyncratic
vibration of his or her own. Bob Dylan started off as a bad performer, and then
spent 10,000 hours practising. But he did not become a better performer. He
became Bob Dylan. And it should be said that those who possess ultimate
mastery, the great born masters, as Bobby Fischer and Michael Jackson conspire
to remind us, have hollow lives of surpassing unhappiness, as if the needed
space for a soul was replaced by whirring clockwork.
Perhaps our children sense this
truth as they struggle to master things.
My own son, who was once a decent
chess player, now plays guitar and very well indeed. Not long ago he went to a
party with me where a jazz combo had been dressed by the party-givers in
ridiculous 1920s-style clothing. He pointed to a guitarist up there in his
ludicrous spats and Gatsby hat, forced for money to clock ticky-tacky chords,
and said, "Dad, that man is a much better guitar player than anyone I have
ever played with."
That is the sad mystery of mastery,
the one that we struggle to explain to our kids. It is very hard to do a
difficult thing, it is very important to learn to do a difficult thing, and
once you have learned to do it, you will always discover that there is someone
else who does it better. The only consolation is that, often as not, those who
do it best of all, are, one way or another, quite hollow inside. This seems
like sage, if sober, wisdom to expect our children to master.