José Luis Picón I Málaga, (EFE).- One hundred years ago, long before people began to talk about artificial intelligence so in vogue today, there was a Spanish inventor, Leonardo Torres Quevedo, who was ahead of his time by creating the first machine in history capable of playing chess.
The Cantabrian inventor designed the first version of the Chess Player in 1913, as that automaton was called. And now the centenary of the perfected version that he presented in 1923 is being celebrated, explains Manuel Azuaga, a writer and journalist from Malaga specializing in chess, in an interview with EFE.
“In the first automaton, the board was vertical and then it was placed horizontal and enhanced with things like voices. Because he was able to warn of checks and checkmates, something incredible and futuristic at that time, ”he highlights.
Azuaga, who this Tuesday will participate in a colloquium to commemorate the centenary at the Torres Quevedo Museum of the School of Civil Engineering, Canals and Ports of the Polytechnic University of Madrid, specifies that the machine did not actually play a complete game. Rather, it started “from a position of white king and rook against black king”.
“That position in chess is already winning,” says Azuaga. He adds that the machine, based on a mechanical computation order, “knew, based on the movements of the black king, how to combine the white king and rook to give it mate. That’s why he always won.”
Defeated Alfonso XIII
In the curiosities section, this machine built with a wooden frame and with the appearance of a grand piano, which moved the pieces with a system of electromagnets, had illustrious adversaries on the board such as King Alfonso XIII. That he “played against the first version of the Chess Player, who of course defeated him, because for that he was the automaton”.
Alfonso de Borbón y Battenberg, Alfonso XIII’s eldest son, visited Torres Quevedo’s workshop in 1922 and saw the machine there. But he couldn’t play against her because at the time she was being upgraded for the new version of him.
Torres Quevedo received greater recognition in France, where the newspaper “Le Figaro” came to describe him as “the most prodigious inventor of his time”.
In his career he designed multiple inventions such as the first Spanish airship. The Spanish Aerocar ferry, which since 1916 has crossed Niagara Falls (Canada) and is still in use. Or the so-called Telekino, a pioneer of the current remote control that executed orders transmitted through hertzian waves.
Artificial intelligence and chess
But, back to his Chess player, he meant laying “the foundations of what later developed artificial intelligence related to chess.”
“We could draw a line from Torres Quevedo to the current AlphaZero, the machine that taught itself to play chess. That he is unbeatable and that he calculates millions of plays per second”, assures Azuaga. That highlights the intimate link between chess and artificial intelligence.
Remember in this regard the words of the Soviet mathematician Alexander Kronrod. Who argued that “chess is the drosophila of artificial intelligence.” Because he saw a parallelism with the importance of the drosophila, the fruit fly, as an experimental insect in Biology and Genetics.
“If you start researching artificial intelligence, everything has been related to chess. Since the fathers of artificial intelligence, such as Alan Turing, Claude Shannon or Marvin Minsky, began to lay its foundations, they worked in the experimental field of the 64 boxes and there is a real link with Torres Quevedo’s automaton, because surely he took as a basis.
Manuel Azuaga does not know if Torres Quevedo was a good chess player, but he is convinced that “he was fascinated by creating an automaton that knew how to play chess, because it seemed to him the greatest feat that an automated intelligence could develop”. EFE