Events and sightings

Scientists of the late 18th century did not have an obvious way to test a machine to see if it was actually mimicking human thought. In some ways, the Chess-Playing Turk was accepted as a thinking machine because it acted like a machine. The division of labor was the first step in designing a machine to do a complex task. The machine designer would have to analyze the task, identify individual actions, and build mechanisms that could perform each action in order. The game of chess had an important role in early computers. By 1951, Alan Turing had created hits Turing test for comparing human intelligence with machines actions and new computer scientists were beginning to devise ways of programming machines to play chess.