> I am intrigued however by the history of chess. I mean the culture behind the game. I read something
> from back to the 18th or 19th century (i'm not sure) of a chess-*computer*. A machine who could
> play against a human player.
> They never found out how it really worked, the 'inventor' took the secret with him in his grave
> (there were some ideas however).

If this is the Turk you're thinking of, most books on the history of chess report as fact that it was operated by a midget hiding in the compartment where the mechanisms were supposed to be.


Not but what some *real* automata weren't fairly impressive.
There was a duck, for instance, that was built for some king, that could walk around, quack, and peck up duck food. It could even *digest* the duck food.

Or there was the Scribe. Little model of a man seated at a desk, that dipped its little quill pen in a little ink pot and wrote on a little piece of paper. The really neat thing was that it was actually programmable - by altering the settings, you could make it write any message you wanted.
"Cogito ergo sum" is reported to have been popular.

Paul