James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

Bobby Fischer may have been the greatest chess player who ever lived. He dismantled the Soviet chess machine single-handedly and became a Cold War icon. But behind the brilliance was isolation, ...

In early December, researchers at DeepMind, the artificial-intelligence company owned by Google’s parent corporation, Alphabet Inc., filed a dispatch from the frontiers of chess. A year earlier, on ...

Five years ago, in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, stood the Eden Musee, noted for its wax figures of history’s horrible episodes and its automatic checker player. This machine, mathematically ...

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.