“There is then no analogy whatever between the operations of the Chess-Player, and those of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage, and if we choose to call the former a pure machine we must be prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the inventions of mankind.”

—  Edgar Allan Poe

Poe stating his arguments that Maelzel's Chess-Player was a hoax. Maelzel's Chess-Player http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/maelzel.htm, Southern Literary Journal (April 1836).

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "There is then no analogy whatever between the operations of the Chess-Player, and those of the calculating machine of M…" by Edgar Allan Poe?
Edgar Allan Poe photo
Edgar Allan Poe 126
American author, poet, editor and literary critic 1809–1849

Related quotes

Nikolai Krylenko photo

“We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula "chess for the sake of chess", like the formula "art for art's sake". We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.”

Nikolai Krylenko (1885–1938) Russian revolutionary, politician and chess organiser

Krylenko on promoting chess in the Soviet Union. Quoted in Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment

“[He] had invented a pinball machine. When we saw it, we said, George! This is not a pinball machine alone. This is the poem of a pinball machine, the essence made delicately concrete, and so forth.”

Grace Paley (1922–2007) American writer and activist

"This Is a Story about My Friend George, the Toy Inventor"

Yukihiro Matsumoto photo

“Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, "By doing this, the machine will run faster. By doing this, the machine will run more effectively. By doing this, the machine will something something something." They are focusing on machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves.”

Yukihiro Matsumoto (1965) Japanese computer scientist

Yukihiro Matsumoto " The Philosophy of Ruby, A Conversation with Yukihiro Matsumoto, Part I http://www.artima.com/intv/ruby4.html" by Bill Venners on 2003-09-29 (Artima Developer).

Ernesto Che Guevara photo

“We must remember that machines do not, as in the capitalist system, compete with workers or enslave workers. Workers must view machines as the liberators of their force. Machines are placed at the service of workers as soon as the exploitation of man by man stops. And that is what we are striving for: we are trying to turn machines into liberating instruments of peasants, so they will have more time for leisure, so they will have more time to study, to develop in every sense, to achieve the most important thing we must achieve: individuals developed to the full, this is the aim we are all struggling for.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Speech at the National Sugar Plenary Meeting in Camagüey, February 9, 1963 Ernesto Che Guevera. Escritos y discursos. Op. cit., vol. 7.
On Automation (1963)

Giuseppe Peano photo

“Geometric calculus consists in a system of operations analogous to those of algebraic calculus, but in which the entities on which the calculations are carried out, instead of being numbers, are geometric entities which we shall define.”

Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932) Italian mathematician

Geometric Calculus (1895) as translated by Lloyd C. Kannenberg (2000) "The Operations of Deductive Logic'" Ch. 1 "Geometric Formations"

John Rogers Searle photo

“We often attribute "understanding" and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

Minds, Brains and Programs (1980)

Ray Bradbury photo

“We have too many cellphones. We've got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

"Ray Bradbury hates big government: ‘Our country is in need of a revolution’" in The Los Angeles Times : Hero Complex (16 August 2010) http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2010/08/16/ray-bradbury-is-sick-of-big-government-our-country-is-in-need-of-a-revolution/

“Without mankind machines are nothing.”

Edmund Cooper (1926–1982) British writer

The Overman Culture (1971)

Peter Kropotkin photo

“Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of men.”

Peter Kropotkin book The Conquest of Bread

Source: The Conquest of Bread (1892), Ch. 1 : Our Riches, p. 57

Related topics