Who was [Leonardo Torres Quevedo]? Not exactly a household name, but as [IEEE Spectrum] points out, he invented a chess automaton in 1920 that would foreshadow the next century’s obsession with computers playing chess.

Don’t confuse this with the infamous Mechanical Turk, which appeared to be a chess computer but was really a guy hiding inside a fake chess computer. The Spanish engineer’s machine really did play a modified end game. The chessboard was vertical, and pegs represented pieces. There were mechanical arms to move the pegs. The device actually dates back to 1912, with a public demonstration in Paris in 1914. Given [Quevedo’s] native language, the machine was called El Ajedrecista.

The first machine had a vertical board.

Of course, it couldn’t play a full game of chess. The machine always played white with a king and rook in a fixed position. The human’s lone black king could be on one of 48 squares in the first six ranks that were legal. The machine could defend its king and reach checkmate, although it could take up to 63 moves, and standard chess rules would call a draw on 50 moves without a capture or pawn move.

In 1920, the machine got a facelift, although it used the same algorithm. Now normal chess pieces were moved by means of electromagnets. A recorded voice would say check or mate (in Spanish) when appropriate, and after three illegal moves, the machine would turn off. It also beat grandmaster [Savielly Tartakower] at the Paris Cybernetic Congress in 1951, making him the first chess grandmaster to lose to a machine.

If you want to know more about the actual algorithm, Wikipedia’s got you covered. As you might expect, the pieces had metal bottoms that closed contacts, so play was probably a little finicky. Both chess machines are still on display at a museum in Madrid.

Like many people today, [Quevedo] was interested in exploring if machines could think and what it means to think, anyway. Automatic chess boards are fairly common now, but amazing for the early 1900s. Or, you can skip the board and go 100% computerized without as much memory as you might think.

Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/07/03/the-chess-computer-from-1912/