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 seems 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?