In the 18th century, the court of Marie Theresa of Austria was wowed by an extraordinary invention. The Mechanical Turk was presented as a chess playing machine.
It would go on to tour around Europe for decades, winning most of its matches before eventually being destroyed in 1854.
That it was created decades before Ada Lovelace was born, let alone conceived what a computer would be alongside Charles Babbage, was irrelevant.
So too was the small matter that the first computer programme that could beat a grandmaster in chess was still more than two centuries away.
It mattered not because it was an illusion. Some clever trickery enabled a hidden real player to hide within the Mechanical Turk and actually play the game.
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