Fridaygram: early chess computer, Angkor Wat mystery, Art Project expansion
By Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog
Editor
This year marks the 100th anniversary of
El Ajedrecista, a very cool
chess-playing machine that is credited as the first computer game. To celebrate El Ajedrecista
and its creator,
Leonardo
Torres-Quevedo, Google and the Technical University of Madrid are holding a
conference next week. This event will
discuss Torres-Quevedo’s many inventions, which included a
cable
car that still runs over the Niagara Whirlpool and an
arithmometer that could perform
calculations.
The conference takes place on Wednesday, November 7th and features lectures and exhibits,
including El Ajedrecista itself. If you’re going to be in Madrid, you can
request an invitation. Note that if
you play against El Ajedrecista, you’re going to lose: Torres-Quevado cleverly designed the
machine to play an endgame from a
superior
position.
Speaking of moving pieces around,
Angkor Wat is a huge temple
complex, made from literally millions of massive sandstone blocks. Historians have wondered
how ancient laborers moved these blocks to the building site. According to a
new
study reported by
+LiveScience, the blocks were made
in quarries and transported 37 kilometers via a network of canals. A previous theory suggested
the blocks spent part of their journey going upstream in a river, but the newly discovered
canals make the trip much shorter, and a shorter route is important when you’re pushing
multi-ton hunks of sandstone around.
Finally, if you’re have some time this weekend, you can lose yourself in a bunch of
new
works available from the Google Art Project, including collections from Italy,
Turkey, Peru, the U.S., and China. Beautiful.
Every Friday, we take a break from technical posts and publish Fridaygram,
which contains stuff about science, history, the arts, and anything else cool and nerdy. And
then pretty soon it’s Monday again.
