Walker Chess-player
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The Walker Chess-player was a
chess Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to disti ...
-playing "machine" created by the Walker Brothers of
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. The machine was produced in the 1820s to compete with The Turk, a world-famous chess "machine". Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, a
Bavaria Bavaria ( ; ), officially the Free State of Bavaria (german: Freistaat Bayern, link=no ), is a state in the south-east of Germany. With an area of , Bavaria is the largest German state by land area, comprising roughly a fifth of the total lan ...
n musician with an interest in various machines and devices who owned and operated the Turk, viewed the competing machine and attempted to buy it, but the offer was declined and the duplicate machine toured for a number of years, never receiving the fame that Mälzel's machine did, and eventually fell into obscurity. These 19th-century machines were hoaxes that disguised a human player with
stage-magic Magic, which encompasses the subgenres of illusion, stage magic, and close up magic, among others, is a performing art in which audiences are entertained by tricks, effects, or illusions of seemingly impossible feats, using natural means. It ...
devices; unlike modern chess playing machines which play without human intervention.


References

* Tom Standage, ''The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine''. Walker and Company,
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, 2002. * Gerald M. Levitt, ''The Turk, Chess Automaton''. McFarland and Company Inc. Publishers,
Jefferson, North Carolina Jefferson is a town in and the county seat of Ashe County, North Carolina, United States. The population was 1,611 at the 2010 census. History The North Carolina General Assembly created a special commission in 1799 to found a county seat for A ...
, 2000. Chess automatons Chess in the United States 19th-century robots {{chess-stub