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Name | Medea, wife of mythical Greek hero Jason |
| Date | c. 1300 bc | |
| Machine Foe | Talos, an ichor-fueled giant automaton built by the god Hephaestus to guard the island of Crete. | |
| Showdown | When Jason and his Argonauts attempt to disembark on Crete, Talos easily fends off their physical attacks but proves vulnerable to magic. Trained as a witch, Medea hypnotizes the automaton and forces it to self-destruct. | |
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Name | Lancelot, legendary British knight |
| Date | c. 500 | |
| Machine Foe | A “big and strange” copper knight who has seized the English castle of Dolorous Guard, challenging all comers to fight to the death | |
| Showdown | Hoping to free the castle’s residents, Lancelot fights wave upon wave of the automaton’s minions until he reaches a copper chest. Unlocking it destroys the copper knight’s enchantment, and Lancelot renames the castle Joyous Guard. | |
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Name | Mary and Lydia Molyneux, Lancastrian teenage sisters |
| Date | 1812 | |
| Machine Foe | Two hundred steam-powered looms at the Westhoughton Mill, in northwest England, which threaten to put the region’s textile artisans out of work | |
| Showdown | Amid a national wave of Luddite-inspired attacks on industrial machines, the sisters lead a gang of fifty men to burn the looms. The girls are acquitted of arson, and powered looms are not employed in the town for decades to come. | |
 |
Name | John Henry, African American folk hero |
| Date | c. 1875 | |
| Machine Foe | A pneumatic steam drill, which permits railroad companies to tunnel through mountains more quickly and cheaply than by using human crews | |
| Showdown | After the railroad company he works for purchases a steam drill and lays him off, the “steel-driving man” issues a challenge to his former employer: “I’ll beat your steam drill down.” After briefly outperforming the machine in a drilling race, Henry suddenly collapses and dies.” | |
 |
Name | Garry Kasparov, Soviet-born chess grandmaster |
| Date | 1996 | |
| Machine Foe | Deep Blue, an IBM computer capable of evaluating around 100 million chess moves per second | |
| Showdown | After Kasparov bests the supercomputer in a 1996 tournament in Philadelphia, Deep Blue’s engineers double its processing capacity. Now able to calculate 200 million moves per second, it soundly defeats Kasparov in a 1997 rematch. | |
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Name | Harish Natarajan, British Indian champion debater |
| Date | 2019 | |
| Machine Foe | Project Debater, IBM’s female-voiced AI system that produces formal arguments by combing through millions of published documents in a matter of minutes | |
| Showdown | In a 2019 demonstration in San Francisco, Natarajan and the AI system debate whether preschools should be subsidized. Though Project Debater processed information from 400 million articles, an audience poll determines Natarajan to be the winner. | |
