'Les Automates' in La Nature no. 2142, pp. 56-61. [With] Chess and Computers.

the first computer game

The rare first account of Leonardo Torres y Quevedo's automatic chess player (El Ajedrecista), now considered the first artificial intelligence machine and the first computer game. This detailed and well-illustrated description was published in the French journal La Nature. It is presented here as an extract, together with an attractive first edition of Chess and Computers, a 1976 book by computer chess pioneer David Levy, which contains a full translation of the original article.

At the beginning of the 20th century the Spanish inventor Leonardo Torres y Quevedo (1852-1936) began "demonstrating a theory of automata that looked beyond assembly lines to the industrial use of programmed machines. To prove that machines could do jobs that seemed to require mental ability, he combined electromechanical calculating techniques with his principles of automata, and showed how a machine could be assembled to perform any desired sequence of arithmetic operations" (Eames and Eames, 1990, 66).

Torres y Quevedo first built several algebraic equation solvers and a radio-control system, followed in 1911 by a machine that played end-game chess, pitting 'the machine's rook and king against the king of a human opponent'. It was 'fully automatic with electrical sensing of the pieces of the board and a mechanical arm to move its own pieces' (Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace 385 & 386).

'Soon after it was built, Torres' machine was put on exhibition in Bilbao and Seville... In 1914 the machine crossed the border into France, taking its inventor with it. It was exhibited at the laboratory of the Department of Physical and Experimental Medicine at the Sorbonne and an excellent account of its workings was given by the French scientist Henri Vigneron in La Nature' (Levy, Computers and Chess, p. 13).

Les Automates: Extract from La Nature, modern black cloth tape spine, fine condition. Chess and Computers: First edition, first impression; 8vo; illustrations throughout the text, contemporary French inscription in ink on the front free endpaper, contents clean; original green boards, title to spine gilt, lower corner bumped, boards a little rubbed at the edges, an excellent copy in the lightly rubbed jacket with some small scuffs, two short splits, and a French bookseller's ticket on the front flap; 145pp.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace 386.