22 March 2013 Last updated at 13:36 ET

An 18th Century automaton that could beat human chess opponents seemingly marked the arrival of artificial intelligence. But what turned out to be an elaborate hoax had its own sense of genius, says Adam Gopnik.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the Turk. That sounds, I know, like a very 19th Century remark. "Have you been thinking about the Turk?" one bearded British statesman might have asked another in the 1860s, with an eye to the Sublime Porte and Russian designs on it, and all the rest.

No, The Turk I have in mind is both older and newer than that - I mean the famous 18th Century chess-playing automaton, recently and brilliantly reconstructed in California. And the reason I have been thinking about it is that - well, there are several reasons, one folded into the next, beginning with the candidates' tournament for the world chess championship, being held in London this week, and enclosing, at the end, my own 18-year-old son's departure for college.

If you haven't heard of it before, I should explain what the Turk is, or was. There's a very good book by Tom Standage all about it.

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The BBC's Peter Bowes plays chess with John Gaughan's replica Turk

The Turk first appeared in Vienna in 1770 as a chess-playing machine - a mechanical figure of a bearded man dressed in Turkish clothing, seated above a cabinet with a chessboard on top.

The operator, a man named Johann Maelzel, would assemble a paying audience, open the doors of the lower cabinet and show an impressively whirring clockwork mechanism that filled the inner compartments beneath the seated figure. Then he would close the cabinet, and invite a challenger to play chess. The automaton - the robot, as we would say now - would gaze at the opponent's move, ponder, then raise its mechanical arm and make a stiff but certain move of its own.

The thing was a sensation.

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Chess and 18th Century artificial intelligence