An 18th-century “chess-playing robot” was secretly a person hiding in a box.

Wacky WorldAI & Computers

The Mechanical Turk toured Europe from 1770 and beat players including, reportedly, Napoleon. A skilled human chess player was hidden inside the cabinet. Amazon’s crowd-work service is named after it.

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A computer beat the world chess champion in a match in 1997.In 1958 a newspaper reported that a machine would one day walk, talk and be conscious.The phrase “artificial intelligence” was coined for a summer workshop.