Chess automaton

El Ajedrecista emerged because Leonardo Torres Quevedo wanted to prove that machines could make decisions—not just follow predetermined sequences. In 1912, decades before digital computers existed, he built an automaton that genuinely played chess without any hidden human operator.

The earlier so-called chess automatons—the famous Mechanical Turk of 1770, Mephisto, Ajeeb—were all frauds. Each concealed a human chess master inside the cabinet, manipulating the mechanical arm that moved pieces. Audiences suspected trickery but couldn't prove it. Torres Quevedo, Director of the Laboratory of Applied Mechanics at Madrid's Ateneo Científico, set out to build something different: a machine that actually thought.

El Ajedrecista ('The Chess Player') didn't play full chess games—that would have required computational resources far beyond 1912 technology. Instead, it played a specific endgame: king and rook against a lone king. This simplified problem was solvable with a finite set of rules, yet still required the machine to respond to an opponent's unpredictable moves.

The automaton used an array of electrical contacts beneath the board to detect piece positions. It implemented a six-part algorithm through levers, gears, and electromagnetic relays—analyzing the board state and calculating its response mechanically. If the opponent made an illegal move, a warning light illuminated. Three illegal moves in a row caused the machine to stop playing entirely. When delivering check, a phonographic disc pronounced the words 'jaque al rey' (check to the king). At checkmate, the disc announced victory.

Torres Quevedo demonstrated El Ajedrecista in Paris in 1914, where it caused a sensation. Here was proof that decision-making could be mechanized—that algorithms could be implemented in hardware without human guidance at runtime.

In 1920, his son Gonzalo built an improved version with electromagnets concealed beneath a standard chessboard, eliminating the visible mechanical supports of the original. This second machine was presented at the 1951 French symposium 'Les Machines à calculer et la pensée humaine,' where it defeated Savielly Tartakower—making the grandmaster the first chess master to lose to a machine.

Austrian computer scientist Heinz Zemanek played against El Ajedrecista at the 1958 Brussels World Fair and described it as 'far ahead of its time.' Both original automatons remain in working condition at the Museo Torres Quevedo in Madrid, still capable of defeating opponents using an algorithm designed over a century ago.

MIT professor Nick Montfort has argued that El Ajedrecista was the first computer game in history—though people rarely recognize it as such because it predated general-purpose digital computing by decades. Torres Quevedo had demonstrated that machines could make choices, respond to opponents, and pursue goals. The implications would take another half-century to fully unfold.