For the crowdsourcing website, see Amazon Mechanical Turk. The Mechanical Turk, also known as the Automaton Chess Player, or simply The Turk, was a fraudulent chess-playing machine constructed in 1770, which appeared to be able to play a strong game of chess against a human opponent. The Turk was in fact a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the machine. Other parts of the machinery allowed for a clockwork-type sound to be played when the Turk made a move, further adding to the machinery illusion, and for the Turk to make various facial expressions. In the decade following its debut at Schönbrunn Palace the Turk only played one opponent, Sir Robert Murray Keith, a Scottish noble, and Kempelen went as far as dismantling the Turk entirely following the match. Thicknesse, known in his time as a skeptic, sought out the Turk in an attempt to expose the inner workings of the machine. The story goes that Frederick enjoyed the Turk so much that he paid a large sum of money to Kempelen in exchange for the Turk's secrets.

Alternate versions of the story include Napoleon being unhappy about losing to the machine, playing the machine at a later time, playing one match with a magnet on the board, and playing a match with a shawl around the head and body of the Turk in an attempt to obscure its vision. Mälzel stayed in France with the machine until 1818, when he moved to London and held a number of performances with the Turk and many of his other machines. The appearances of the Turk were profitable for Mälzel, and he continued by taking it and his other machines to the United States. While the Turk still occasionally gave performances, it was eventually relegated to the corners of the museum and forgotten about until 5 July 1854, when a fire that started at the National Theater in Philadelphia reached the Museum and destroyed the Turk. A new article about the Turk did not turn up until 1899, when The American Chess Magazine published an account of the Turk's match with Napoleon Bonaparte. The advertising, as well as an article that appeared in The Illustrated London News, claimed that the play featured Kempelen's Turk, but it was in fact a copy of the Turk created by J. Walker, who had earlier presented the Walker Chess-player. In 2023, the story "Alone Together" from the Tales from the Pizzaplex book series, itself a part of the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise, features a Mechanical Turk as a school project. Walter Benjamin alludes to the Mechanical Turk in the first thesis of his Theses on the Philosophy of History, written in 1940.