This and That

     At the beginning of 1916, WWI was in full swing and so there was not any really memorable tournaments and the only matches of interest were Emanuel Lasker beating Siegbert Tarrasch +5 –0 =1 in Berlin. Then there was the match, also in Berlin, in which Tarrasch defeated Jacques Mieses by a score of +7 –2 =4 for a prize of a half pound of butter. 
     One mildly interesting chess story in 1916 was Julian S. Grant Hayward’s invention of Double Chess that was played on a 16 by 12 board with each side having two sets of pieces. The rules weren’t published until the British Chess Magazine published then in 1929. The year the BCM published the rules Capablanca played a four game match against Geza Maroczy. Capablanca won two games with two draws and found the game "remarkably interesting."

   In 1933 Battle Chess, based on modern warfare, was invented by a Russian named A. C. Yurgelevich. Queens became Airplanes and Kings were General Staffs.
     While similar to chess, rules and strategy were modified. To make room for an up-to-date military campaign, the board contained extra squares and Pawns, Rooks, Bishops and Knights became Soldiers, Heavy Artillery, Machine Guns and Cavalry. A new piece, known as a Tank was also added. 

     The goal was to destroy the active forces of the enemy and to capture or declare checkmate against the hostile general staff. Each of the pieces have powers of movement and destruction according to its specific function in actual warfare. 
    Going back a few years before Double Chess was introduced there was El Ajedrecista (The Chess Player), an automaton built in 1912 by Leonardo Torres y Quevedo.  It was one of the first autonomous machines capable of playing chess. 
     El Ajedrecista was a true automaton as it played without human guidance. It played an endgame with a R and K v. K automatically moving a white king and a rook to mate the black King which was moved by a human opponent. 

     The contraption did not deliver mate in the minimum number of moves and not always within the 50 move rule because of the simple algorithm that calculated the moves. It did, however, checkmate the opponent every time. If an illegal move was made by its opponent, the machine would signal it. 
     The system was totally analog and had a mechanical arm that moved the pieces together with sensors that detected the opponent's movements. It could be considered the first computer game in history and created great excitement when it made its debut at the University of Paris in 1914. 
     It was first widely mentioned in Scientific American as "Torres and His Remarkable Automatic Devices" on November 6, 1915. The pieces had a metallic mesh at their base, which closed an electric circuit that encoded their position in the board. When the black K was moved by hand, an algorithm calculated and performed the next best move for white (the machine). 
     In the first version, the pieces were plugged into the board with checks and mate signaled with light bulbs. Torres y Quevedo’s son, Gonzalo, made an improved version in 1920, which made its moves via electromagnets located under the board. It also included a sound effect, with a voice recording announcing mate when the computer won the game. Both are still working and are on display at the Colegio de Ingenieros de Caminos, Canales y Puertos in Madrid. For more details on this machine visit Reuben Hoggett's cyberneticzoo.  This marvelous site has a history of cybernetic animals and early robots.