22 March 2013 Last updated at 13:36 ET
A Point of View: Chess and 18th Century artificial intelligence
"It's true that the late 18th Century was a great age of automatons, machines that could make programmed looms weave and mechanical birds sing - although always the same song, or tapestry, over and over. But the deeper truth that chess-playing was an entirey different kind of creative activity seemed as obscure to them as it seems obvious to us now.
But in large part, I think people were fooled because they were looking, as we always seem to do, for the beautiful and elegant solution to a problem, even when the cynical and ugly one is right.
The great-grandfather of computer science, Charles Babbage, saw the Turk and though he realised that it was probably a magic trick, he also asked himself what exactly would be required to produce a beautiful solution. What kind of machine would you need to build if you could build a machine to play chess? And his "difference engine" - the first computer - rose in part from his desire to believe that there was a beautiful solution to the problem, even if the one before him was not it."
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