Ah—my favorite is in there:<p><a href="https://tluif.home.xs4all.nl/chescom/EngExcPhanF.html" rel="nofollow">https://tluif.home.xs4all.nl/chescom/EngExcPhanF.html</a><p>It’s a “robotic” board that moves the pieces by itself.<p>You can sometimes find “untested” (i.e., broken) ones on eBay for a reasonable price, and if you’re lucky they’re an easy fix. Mine was stuck because the lock slider had wedged something and the repair took all of 10 minutes.<p>Very clean engineering: a few screws gets you in, there’s a remarkably small PCB, few wires and mechanical pieces: the main mechanism consists of two orthogonally mounted sliders with a stepper motor and belt each.<p>I don’t even play chess, but it’s amazing to watch it play both sides.<p>They also use a clever algorithm to route pieces around other piece since (obviously) the pieces can’t jump over other pieces given that they are moved by a magnet under the board.
We had a Fidelity Chess Challenger 7 when I was a kid.<p>I was a horrible chess player but painstakingly worked out a way to win as white, keeping a detailed log of my experiments in a notebook. The first couple moves were wildly out of book (because I didn't know book), and the computer with its limited Z80 processor always computed the same moves after that. Some googling [1] shows the board's Elo is 1300ish.<p>To illustrate the state of the art in 1979, the manual [2] explicitly calls out that it understands en passant and castling.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.spacious-mind.com/html/chess_challenger_7.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.spacious-mind.com/html/chess_challenger_7.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https://ia902902.us.archive.org/20/items/mame0.211manualsfullset/cc7.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://ia902902.us.archive.org/20/items/mame0.211manualsful...</a>
Very cool! Wouldn't it be even cooler if the museum could score a couple of the very oldest machines? I'm talking about the El Ajedrecista machine (1912)[1] and Caissa [2][3] (named after the goddess of Chess[4]) built by Claude Shannon.<p>[1]. <a href="https://www.chessprogramming.org/El_Ajedrecista" rel="nofollow">https://www.chessprogramming.org/El_Ajedrecista</a><p>[2]. <a href="https://www.computerhistory.org/chess/stl-430b9bbe92716/" rel="nofollow">https://www.computerhistory.org/chess/stl-430b9bbe92716/</a><p>[3]. <a href="https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/collections/object/2007.030.005?query=Shannon&page=6&resultIndex=62" rel="nofollow">https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/collections/object/2007.030.005?qu...</a><p>[4]. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ca%C3%AFssa" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ca%C3%AFssa</a><p>Technically, these electro mechanical machines may not qualify as computers, but still, what a scoop it would be to get them!