One or two hundred years from now, some writer will produce a study of the mania that overcame stock traders in the 1990s, when ignorance of the true capabilities of Internet technology led to wild ...

Gaby Wood, a writer for the Observer in London, is the author of "Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life" (2002, Alfred A. Knopf). Some days ago in New York City, Garry ...

Chess is famous as perhaps the most respected board game ever played, and we often uses chess as a way to metaphorically teach lessons about the world. But as it turns out, chess is also pretty good ...

The idea that artificial intelligence-powered machines could one day rise up and cause harm to humanity has fueled the imaginations of science fiction writers for decades. Several entertainment ...

Who was [Leonardo Torres Quevedo]? Not exactly a household name, but as [IEEE Spectrum] points out, he invented a chess automaton in 1920 that would foreshadow the next century’s obsession with ...

Discusses the invention by Wolfgang von Kempeden of a mechanical man made of wood and powered by clockwork, and its impact on the history of technology.