El Ajedrecista
First true automaton able to play chess / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about El Ajedrecista?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
El Ajedrecista ([el axeðɾeˈθista], English: The Chess Player) is an automaton built in 1912 by Leonardo Torres Quevedo in Madrid,[2] one of the first autonomous machines capable of playing chess.[3] As opposed to the human-operated The Turk and Ajeeb, El Ajedrecista had a true integrated automation built to play chess without human guidance. It played an endgame with three chess pieces, automatically moving a white king and a rook to checkmate the black king moved by a human opponent.
The device could be considered the first computer game in history.[4] It created great excitement when it made its debut, at the University of Paris in 1914. It was first widely mentioned in Scientific American as "Torres and His Remarkable Automatic Devices" on November 6, 1915.[5] In 1951, El Ajedrecista defeated Savielly Tartakower at the Paris Cybernetic Congress, being the first Grandmaster to lose against a machine.[6]
The automaton does not deliver checkmate in the minimum number of moves, nor always within the 50 moves allotted by the fifty-move rule, because of the simple algorithm that calculates the moves. It did, however, checkmate the opponent every time.[7] If an illegal move was made by the opposite player, the automaton would signal it by turning on a light. If the opposing player made three illegal moves, the automaton would stop playing.[8]