Santander (EFE) of what today, a century later, is called artificial intelligence.
“He is the total inventor, the complete engineer, he is the father of automatics and artificial intelligence,” the mathematician Francisco González, an expert on the figure of Torres-Quevedo, stresses in an interview with EFE, to whom he pays tribute with two exhibitions at the University of Cantabria.
One of these samples, “From the telekino to the automatic”, which can be seen in the Faculty of Sciences, focuses on the contributions of the inventor, born in Santa Cruz de Iguña (Molledo) in 1852, to electromechanics, a science ” who applied for the first time.
“He glimpsed and announced to the international scientific community where the shots could go with this technology,” says the mathematician.
In 1914, the inventor published the founding treatise on automatics, which is based on the concept of the “automaton”. “It is a machine that has energy, members, sensitivity to receive information from the outside and, above all, that has discernment,” he explains.
Can machines think?
According to González, Torres-Quevedo spoke, for the first time in history, of a machine “capable of receiving information from abroad, memorizing it with all that information, making decisions by itself.”
“This is the definition we can give of a robot today,” points out the mathematician, who regrets that, although the Cantabrian engineer designed an analytical machine similar to a computer thirty years before Alan Turing, and went so far as to build the arithmometer (a calculator), he was unable to fully develop it due to his advanced age.
Before that treaty, Torres-Quevedo did design and present “El ajedrecista” in 1912, in Paris, a machine capable of beating anyone at chess in a game endgame. “The machine intelligently responds to each movement of the human until it gives the final checkmate,” explains González.
“The machine can carry out the cerebral work of man”, headlined press articles of the time about this work by Torres-Quevedo, who they claimed would “replace the human mind with machines”.
In this way, the Cantabrian inventor began, according to González, to advance the “potentialities” of what we know today as artificial intelligence and reflected on the thought of machines.
“To the question of whether a machine can think, Torres-Quevedo says that the intelligent one is the human who designs these machines, and that these can articulate a more or less coherent discourse depending on their complexity,” says the mathematician.
Torres-Quevedo rejected that idea because, with his technology, a machine capable of “thinking” and “reconstructing speeches” would occupy “an entire building.”
“He understands that with this technology nobody is going to do that,” argues González, who stresses that “even in that, the potential is advancing.”
the total inventor
The inventor from Santa Cruz de Iguña is known for having designed the Niagara Falls ferry, which has been running for more than a hundred years without registering failures, but he is also the author of dirigible balloons or the telekine, a system to remotely control that device flying, an invention that refers directly to current drones.
His patents also include the one for the catamaran or binave and the one for the shorthand machine, to copy a speech as it is pronounced without the need to resort to shorthand.
Pablo Ayerbe Caselles