The Games People Play

Kasparov is charismatic, worldly and optimistic - his latest plan is to use what he has learned from chess to bring genuine democracy to Putin's Russia - yet it was his defeat by IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997 that marked the sad end of the battle for chess supremacy between men and machine. This has a long history. Way back in the 1770's an Austro-Hungarian baron Wolfgang Von Kempelan, toured Europe with a chess-playing automaton called The Mechanical Turk - although it actually contained a dwarf hidden within a secret compartment.
Matthew J Reisz ABC Independent 27.05.08



For all fellow chess players..... I had actually been hoping to find a picture of The Mechanical Turk!