James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

Who was [Leonardo Torres Quevedo]? Not exactly a household name, but as [IEEE Spectrum] points out, he invented a chess automaton in 1920 that would foreshadow the next century’s obsession with ...

Once upon a time in the 18th century, a fantastic chess-playing machine known as the Mechanical Turk was exhibited around the world, stunning audiences with its ability to beat skilled players and ...

Gaby Wood, a writer for the Observer in London, is the author of "Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life" (2002, Alfred A. Knopf). Some days ago in New York City, Garry ...

Chess is famous as perhaps the most respected board game ever played, and we often uses chess as a way to metaphorically teach lessons about the world. But as it turns out, chess is also pretty good ...

File this one under inevitable but hilarious. Mechanical Turk is a service that from its earliest days seemed to invite shenanigans, and indeed researchers show that nearly half of its "turkers" ...

Sometimes, all you need is a virtual sweatshop to get things done. You need to do a lot of mind-numbing, repetitive tasks and you don’t want to pay much for them. The solution may be Amazon’s ...