So, Tom, where does it all begin?

Okay, it's 1783 and Paris is gripped by the prospect of a chess match.

And one of the contestants in this chess match is Francois-André Philidor, who is considered

the greatest chess player, certainly in Paris,

probably in Europe, and probably in the whole world. And his party piece is playing against two

opponents at the same time while blindfolded, so he has to remember where everything is on both

chess boards. And there's even a chess move named after him called the Philidor Sacrifice.

So essentially he's missed a chess.

And the reason everyone's so excited in this particular summer is that he's about to go head to head

with the other big sensation in the chess world at the time.

But his opponent isn't a man, and it's not a woman either.

It's a machine.

So this sounds a lot like when Gary Kasparov took on Deep Blue, the IBM chess playing

supercomputer, but that was only a couple of decades ago. And this chess match in Paris

is happening more than 200 years ago. It doesn't seem like that would have been possible back in the 1780s.

Well, not a lot of people have heard of this strange story.

It turns out to be one of those curious tales from history that can help us understand technology

today and where it might go tomorrow.

Which is what we're doing with this show,

digging out these old stories to see what we can learn from them.

We're going to look at the first cyber attack,

which happened in the 1830s.

...