Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 3.
Chess position with King and Rook against King
Although the Turk was a hoax, von Kempelen made an important in-
direct contribution to Artificial Intelligence by stimulating people's imag-
ination about the idea of a Chess-playing machine. Goethe had already
described Chess as “the touchstone of the intellect”, a view that has not
dimmed with time. And because it is generally accepted that playing
Chess well requires intelligence, the creation of a machine that could
play Chess well would in fact be the creation of an artificial intellect.
Torres y Quevedo's Chess Endgame Machine
Von Kempelen was followed by others who devised machines that worked
along similar lines to his own, but it was not until the Spanish inventor
Leonardo Torres y Quevedo (1852-1936) designed and built an electro-
mechanical Chess player in 1890 that a genuine artificially intelligent
game-player was born. Torres y Quevedo was a prolific and highly cre-
ative inventor. He invented a type of cable-car that was installed in Bil-
bao, Rio de Janeiro, Chamonix and at Niagara Falls where it is still in
use. He pioneered the radio control of machines; he designed and built
a series of airships; he built a machine for solving algebraic equations; he
published a paper in 1914, demonstrating the possibility of designing an
electro-mechanical digital computer 20 years before Konrad Zuse; and
in 1920 he designed a precedessor to the digital computer in the form of
a calculating machine connected to a typewriter.
