In London, the prosthesis manufacturer Charles Gümpel had built a chess automaton around 1876, which he called Mephisto and looked like the eponymous demon of German folklore (also called Mephistopheles). However, his abilities were of human nature and at times Isidor Gunsberg lent his chess skills to the automaton. Unlike Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Schachtürken or the Ajeeb, which had a human hidden inside the automaton, the Mephisto was operated remotely by electromagnetic technology via a cable from an adjoining room. Supposedly, the Mephisto never lost a game at all. In 1889, Gümpel traveled with his Mephisto to the World’s Fair in Paris to demonstrate it. Afterwards it was dismantled and the traces of the chess automaton disappear. El autómata ajedrecista – the chess automaton In 1912 the Spaniard Leonardo Torres y Quevedo built probably the first functional chess automaton, which was then presented at the World Exhibition 1914 in Paris. El autómata ajedrecista is historically the first automaton that could play real parts of a chess game. Strictly speaking, the automaton could not play a complete game of chess. The chess automaton was able to automatically play a white king (initially on a8) and a white rook (initially on b7) against the lone black king located on any square. The algorithm was suboptimal, but could win in less than 50 moves against any defense. Although it sometimes failed to meet the 50-move rule (which states that a game can be drawn if each player has made the last fifty moves in a row without moving a pawn or capturing a piece), it always ended up giving checkmate by following the algorithm by which it was programmed. It used mechanical arms to make its moves and electrical sensors to detect its opponent’s responses. A second, mechanical but not algorithmic, improved El Ajedrecista was built in 1922 by Leonardo Torres Quevedo’s son Gonzalo under his father’s supervision. At the 1951 Paris Cybernetics Congress, the improved machine was presented to a larger audience and explained to Norbert Wiener. Even though the automaton could only play king/rook vs king, El Ajedrecista can be considered the world’s first chess computer, even a special robot that can move its own pieces. It is still functional and can be seen at the Torres Quevedo Museum of Engineering, Institute of Civil Engineering at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.
