How it began
After building several algebraic calculating machines, the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo began experimenting with automation and remote control in the first decade of the twentieth century, producing a series of electromechanical devices under the heading he called automática. El Ajedrecista, the chess player, was completed in 1912 and exhibited for the first time in Valladolid in 1913. It was shown in Paris in 1914, where it caused great excitement.
Before it existed
Earlier chess automatons were not what they appeared to be. The Mechanical Turk, Mephisto and Ajeeb all relied on a concealed human player who chose the moves. El Ajedrecista differed in kind: it was a genuinely autonomous machine that played without human guidance. Torres Quevedo's own earlier work on the telekino, his wireless remote-control system, fed into the electromechanical techniques he used for the chess machine.
How it works
The machine played a simplified endgame with three pieces: its own white king and rook against a black king moved by the human opponent, who could place the king on any square. An array of electrical contacts beneath the board detected the opponent's moves. An internal mechanism then moved the machine's pieces, enforced legal play and carried the game through to checkmate automatically. The computer pioneer Heinz Zemanek described the rules it followed as a cleverly designed algorithm implemented with levers and gears.
How it spread
Scientific American reported on the device as an electric automaton on May 16, 1914, and again in November 1915 under the title Torres and His Remarkable Automatic Devices. A second version, built in 1920 and presented in 1923, moved the pieces with electromagnets under an ordinary chessboard. In 1951 it was shown at a Paris symposium on calculating machines and human thought, where it mated the grandmaster Savielly Tartakower, and Zemanek played against it at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair.
What lasted
El Ajedrecista is widely regarded as the first computer game and as a landmark in decision-making automation and computer chess, anticipating software chess programs by several decades. The historian Nick Montfort wrote that in 1912 Torres Quevedo devised the first computer game. Both automatons remain in working condition and are on display at the Museo Torres Quevedo in the civil engineering school in Madrid.
