7 Science Fiction Predictions That Came True

6. Chess Robot

Two or three times after moving a piece the stranger slightly inclined his head, and each time I observed that Moxon shifted his king. All at once the thought came to me that the man was dumb. And then that he was a machinean automaton chessplayer!

- Moxon's Master, Ambrose Bierce, 1899

This depiction of a chess automaton was likely inspired by a fake chess-playing machine built in the 1700s called the Mechanical Turk. Whilst the Turk turned out to have a chess master concealed in a hidden compartment, the idea of an machine beating a chess master has stuck around and passed into "AI landmark" status alongside the Turing Test.

Supercomputer Deep Blue hit the headlines in 1997 when it beat chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov and, in early 2016, Google's DeepMind AI beat a world champion of the east Asian board game Go a straight five times in a row.

The chess automaton in Moxon's Master actually goes on to (spoilers) murder its creator, so perhaps we should really be unplugging them while we still can.