Publisher's Synopsis
Said player is none other than "the Turk", the ingenuity created by Baron von Kempelen who was paraded, by its creator and after his death by Maelzel, through the courts of half Europe, to the amazement of aristocrats and nobles, and that passed for being an automaton that played chess without any human intervention. "The Turk" invariably beat his rivals, not in vain several prestigious chess players took a place inside the automaton. "El Turco" was a sham, of course.
Poe's work is an attempt to unveil that farce. He analyzes Maelzel's movements in detail while he shows the inside of the automaton to the public, tries to understand how the mechanisms that give the doll movement work and concludes that there is a hidden player inside.
