The dream of creating a chess playing machine stems long before the invention of personal computers. In 1770 Wolfgang Von Kempelen constructed “The Turk”, an automaton chess player which defeated many human opponents. It was eventually discovered that the Turk’s mechanisms were handled by a strong chess master hidden inside. In the ‘60s the sixth world champion Mikhail Botvinnik started working on developing a chess playing program, but due to the level of technology couldn't reach notable results.
The Turk had first appeared in 1769 in the court of Maria Theresa, the empress of Austria-Hungary. In a bid to impress the empress, an inventor and royal advisor named Wolfgang von Kempelen had vowed to build an automaton whose illusion and spectacle would surpass anything she had seen before. Intrigued, Maria Theresa granted him a leave of absence to work on his mystery project.
