On the nature of design

Abstract

At the attention of scientist, philosophers and layman alike. It was so extraordinary in fact that even today we are fascinated by it and by the no less uncommon people who got involved. The subject of this story was an amazing machine, more precisely an automaton. Known as the Turk, it was a mechanical chess player, made of wood and dressed in a Turkish-like costume (see Fig. 1). It played chess with Napoleon, inspired Charles Babbage and moved the great Edgar Allan Poe to write a critical essay about the nature of the automaton. © 2006 Springer.