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Chess and 18th Century artificial intelligence (2013)
Adam Gopnik considers how an 18th Century chess robot - the mechanical Turk - was more than just an elaborate hoax.
The operator, a man named Johann Maelzel, would assemble a paying audience, open the doors of the lower cabinet and show an impressively whirring clockwork mechanism that filled the inner compartments beneath the seated figure. 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. And it should be said that those who possess ultimate mastery, the great born masters, as Bobby Fischer and Michael Jackson conspire to remind us, have hollow lives of surpassing unhappiness, as if the needed space for a soul was replaced by whirring clockwork.
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