Only a few months ago, IBM’s Deep Blue excited and intrigued us as it challenged the chess wizardry of Garry Kasparov. In the late 18th and first half of the 19th Century, humans were similarly ...

While stirrings and speculations around the chess-playing automaton made by Wolfgang von Kempelen are what made him most famous, his inventions and interest were much wider. This ranks him among ...

Chess is famous as perhaps the most respected board game ever played, and we often uses chess as a way to metaphorically teach lessons about the world. But as it turns out, chess is also pretty good ...

An 18th Century automaton that could beat human chess opponents seemingly marked the arrival of artificial intelligence. But what turned out to be an elaborate hoax had its own sense of genius, says ...

A mechanical marvel may have helped set Edgar Allan Poe on his life’s creative path. At the beginning of the 1770s, Wolfgang von Kempelen, a European inventor, premiered his newest creation: a robotic ...

The inside story of an ingenious chess-playing machine that thrilled crowds, terrified opponents, and won like clockwork. One autumn day in 1769, a 35-year-old civil servant was summoned to the ...

A master magic builder from California has recreated an 18th Century automaton that took Europe and America by storm. For more than 80 years, Wolfgang von Kempelen's Mechanical Turk amazed people on ...

One or two hundred years from now, some writer will produce a study of the mania that overcame stock traders in the 1990s, when ignorance of the true capabilities of Internet technology led to wild ...

Mechanical Turk is a website owned and operated by Amazon since its creation in 2005. The name comes from an 18 th century chess-playing device commissioned by Austrian Empress Maria Theresa.