Maelzel's Chess-Player

Answers

• Q03THINKING

  Can a machine exercise judgment when faced with circumstances its maker did not anticipate?

  No. indeterminate situations require a mind. Calculation is determinate and can be mechanized, but in chess no move follows necessarily from the last and the opponent's will interrupts any fixed sequence, so a pure machine could not play.

  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. Let us place the first move in a game of chess, in juxta-position with the data of an algebraical question, and their great difference will be immediately perceived. From the latter — from the data — the second step of the question, dependent thereupon, inevitably follows. It is modeled by the data. It must be thus and not otherwise. … But in proportion to the progress made in a game of chess, is the uncertainty of each ensuing move. A few moves having been made, no step is certain. Different spectators of the game would advise different moves. All is then dependent upon the variable judgment of the players. Now even granting (what should not be granted) that the movements of the Automaton Chess-Player were in themselves determinate, they would be necessarily interrupted and disarranged by the indeterminate will of his antagonist.

  Opened the Wikisource text; the passage beginning 'Arithmetical or algebraical calculations are, from their very nature, fixed and determinate' states the argument. Southern Literary Messenger, April 1836.