Introduction

The Raspberry Turk is a robot that can play chess. It is completely open source and the methods for building it are documented on this website. The project is written almost entirely in Python, runs on a Raspberry Pi, and incorporates aspects of computer vision, data science, machine learning, robotics, 3D printing, and—of course—chess.

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Background

The Raspberry Turk is inspired by the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. I learned about this fascinating device years ago, and recently read The Turk by Tom Standage. After having recently studied machine learning, I decided a chess playing robot could be a fun project to apply some learned material.

The Mechanical Turk won most of its games, touring through Europe and America and playing famous people of that time, such as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. The device, which was claimed to be a purely mechanical creation, remained a mystery to spectators for most of its lifetime. Famously, Edgar Allan Poe wrote an article speculating on how it could work.