I, Robot

The Automatic Turk

The “Automatic Turk” was a chess-playing automaton of the eighteenth century that won almost every game it played (defeating Napoleon, and Catherine the Great was said to have been disqualified for cheating). Although the chess player was widely known to be operated by a man, this did not diminish its appeal. The chess player was “less an admirable piece of mechanism than a philosophical game” – like all robots, it presents a “fundamental challenge to our perception of what makes us human”.*

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