Torres Quevedo's El Ajedrecista (chess automaton)
El Ajedrecista de Torres Quevedo
- Date
- 1912 (presentado en 1914) · confidence high
- Place
- Madrid, Community of Madrid, Spain
- Credited to
- Leonardo Torres Quevedo
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
An electromechanical automaton that plays the king-and-rook against king endgame by itself: it detects the opponent's move through electrical contacts and moves its pieces with electromagnets following an algorithm that always wins. It is one of the first machines to make decisions in a game without human intervention.
A first version was built in 1912 and presented in Paris in 1914; the second, more refined one dates from 1920. Unlike The Turk or Ajeeb, which concealed a human player, it is a genuine automaton.
What it led to
- debate about thinking machines (Essays on Automatics, 1914)
- a showing at the Paris cybernetics congress (1951), where Wiener played against it
- a precedent for computer chess programmes