A workshop held in 1956 at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, is usually considered the beginning of artificial intelligence. Participants included John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky. Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse, who already dealt with this topic in the 1940s, are also mentioned as the founders of this discipline.
For decades, machine chess was considered the highlight of artificial intelligence. It was not until 1997 that IBM's Deep Blue program was able to beat then-world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Today, programs such as AlphaGo zero and AlphaZero from Deepmind (Google) master much more difficult games using artificial neural networks. If one takes chess as a yardstick for artificial intelligence, however, this branch of research begins much earlier, at the latest in 1912 with the chess automaton of the Spaniard Leonardo Torres Quevedo (cf. Fig. 1). In the chess-playing Turk (1769) of Wolfgang von Kempelen, a human player was hidden.
Torres Quevedo showed his electromechanical chess machine (El ajedrecista, chess player), developed from 1912, in the machine laboratory of the Sorbonne University in Paris in 1914. The endgame machine was able to checkmate the king of a human opponent with a rook and king.
Figure 1: The first chess automaton of Torres Quevedo.
This electromechanical endgame machine (1912) is considered the first chess machine in the world.
Credit: Museo Leonardo Torres Quevedo, Madrid
In 1951, Norbert Wiener played against the second model (1922) at the Paris computer conference, see https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/222486-the-birthplace-of-artificial-intelligence/fulltext. The Austrian computer scientist Heinz Zemanek, who played against this chess machine at the Brussels World Fair in 1958, described it as a historical automaton that was far ahead of its time. According to Zemanek, Torres Quevedo designed a very clever six-part algorithm for the end game, which was implemented using levers, gears, and relays.
References
Herbert Bruderer is a retired lecturer in didactics of computer science at ETH Zürich. More recently, he has been an historian of technology. bruderer@retired.ethz.ch, herbert.bruderer@bluewin.
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