The Great Chess Automaton

xi, 116 pp. "What was it? Was it really a working chess automaton, invented some two hundred years ago? Or was it an ingenious fraud that "baffled the crowned heads of Europe"? It was the famous Turk, invented by Kempelen around 1770 and adapted by Maelzel in the nineteenth century. A seated figure in the form of a costumed Turk, with a chessboard before it, it played chess before the royalty of Europe... It appeared in public exhibitions over much of Europe and eventually it came to the United States, where Edgar Allan Poe wrote a famous analysis of its mechanism. The myth of the genuineness of the automaton was scrupulously maintained during its day. Today, of course, we know that it was simply a remarkably effective early piece of stage magic. But during its lifetime it had a mystique that is almost unbelievable. It raised perhaps for the first time (even among intelligent viewers who had suspicions of how it worked) the question of whether machine intelligence could equal and even surpass human intelligence."--rear wrapper.