and more commonplace. But it was still essentially
clockwork.
Chess is quite obviously an enterprise that
requires thought. It is not too surprising, then,
that chess-playing machines of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, most notably “the
Turk,” were exhibited as intelligent machines
and even fooled some people into believing the
machines were playing autonomously. Samuel
L. Clemens (“Mark Twain”) wrote in a newspaper
column, for instance, that the Turk must be
a machine because it played so well! Chess was
widely used as a vehicle for studying inference
and representation mechanisms in the early
decades of AI work. (A major milestone was
reached when the Deep Blue program defeated
the world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, in
1997 [McCorduck 2004].)