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Poe recognized just how impressive it might be for a machine to play chess at all.

His essay expressed a very deep and very modern ambivalence about the prospect that computers might be able to imitate, or improve on, the higher functions of man. What was truly visionary about Poe’s essay on the Mechanical Turk, however, was his grasp of its implications for what we now call artificial intelligence (a term that would not be coined until 120 years later). He was rightly suspicious, for instance, that a man (later determined to be the German chess master William Schlumberger) could always be found packing and unpacking the machine but was nowhere to be seen while the game was being played (aha! he was in the box). Poe is regarded as the inventor of the detective story, 1 and some of his work in sleuthing the hoax was uncanny. Poe deduced that it was an elaborate hoax, its cogs and gears concealing a chess master who sat in its cupboards and manipulated its levers to move the pieces about the board and nod its turban-covered head every time that it put its opponent into check. The machine, constructed in Hungary in 1770 before Poe or the United States of America were born, had come to tour Baltimore and Richmond in the 1830s after having wowed audiences around Europe for decades. The twenty-seven-year-old Edgar Allan Poe, like many others before him, was fascinated by the Mechanical Turk, a contraption that had once beaten Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin at chess.