Did an 18th-century engineer manage to build a chess-playing automaton?
by Futility Closet from on (#32MEW)
In 1770, Hungarian engineer Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled a miracle: a mechanical man who could play chess against human challengers. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll meet Kempelen's Mechanical Turk, which mystified audiences in Europe and the United States for more than 60 years.
We'll also sit down with Paul ErdAs and puzzle over a useful amateur.