VIBES
Oddities

Things that looked like minds, and were something else. Each one taught the people studying it a method they still use.

*The Turk — a chess-playing automaton, 1770, with a person inside
*Clever Hans — a horse that did sums, 1904, by watching you
*Phineas Gage — an iron bar through the head, 1848, and the story that grew
*The homunculus — a little man drawn on the brain, and what the drawing hides
*machines that answer — a timeline, from the Turk to chat models

On deck: PARRY, the program that simulated paranoia in 1971 (Colby, Weber & Hilf, 1971), and El Ajedrecista, Leonardo Torres Quevedo's genuine chess endgame machine of about 1912.

Cited on this page

  1. Colby, Weber & Hilf (1971). Artificial Paranoia. Artificial Intelligence. doi:10.1016/0004-3702(71)90002-6

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rev. Oct 24 2026