In 1770 a chess-playing robot, built by a Hungarian inventor, caused a sensation across Europe. It took the form of a life-size wooden figure, dressed in Turkish clothing, seated behind a cabinet ...

Amazon.com is quietly testing another interesting innovation, this time tapping into the . The cheeky geeks there call it the Mechanical Turk, after an 18th century hoax, a mannequin that appeared to ...

A mechanical marvel may have helped set Edgar Allan Poe on his life’s creative path. At the beginning of the 1770s, Wolfgang von Kempelen, a European inventor, premiered his newest creation: a robotic ...

Atlas Obscura on Slate is a blog about the world’s hidden wonders. Like us on Facebook and Tumblr, or follow us on Twitter. Warnings over the perils of artificial intelligence arms races have made ...

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 ...

In many parts of the AI community, people are used to thinking about artificial intelligence as applied to new and modern forms of game theory. For example, some of the most tangible rollouts of AI ...