Leonardo Torres y Quevedo

Spanish civil engineer and inventor (1852–1936) who built El Ajedrecista, an electromechanical automaton that could play a king-and-rook chess endgame against a human opponent without any human intervention — first demonstrated in 1914, decades before the term "artificial intelligence" existed. For this vault he matters as the load-bearing figure behind Schmidhuber's "the first practical AI (1914)" dating in Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning (arXiv:2212.11279), where Schmidhuber calls him "the 20th century's first AI pioneer" — a priority claim stated without hedge, in contrast to a hedged comparable claim ("perhaps the first 'modern' programmers") Schmidhuber applies to Jacquard's loom programmers elsewhere in the same document.

References

• claim-schmidhuber-1914-torres-y-quevedo-claim-unhedged-vs-jacquard-hedge
• claim-schmidhubers-timeline-phrase-comes-from-abstract-not-section-headers
• claim-schmidhubers-annotated-history-projects-deep-learning-onto-pre-1900-mathematics