1900–1950
1914
Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres y Quevedo demonstrates the first chess-playing machine, El Ajedrecista at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. It used electromagnets and was fully automated. El Ajedrecista automatically played a simple chess endgame of king and rook versus king. The machine required no human intervention once it was set up—it autonomously made legal chess moves and if the human opponent made an illegal move, the machine would signal the error. If the machine was placed in a winning position, it was able to checkmate the human opponent reliably.