El Ajedrecista is an automaton built in 1912 by Leonardo Torres Quevedo in Madrid, one of the first autonomous machines capable of playing chess. As opposed to the human-operated The Turk and Ajeeb, El Ajedrecista had a true integrated automation built to play chess without human guidance. It played an endgame with three chess pieces, automatically moving a white king and a rook to checkmate the black king moved by a human opponent.

Leonardo Torres Quevedo was a Spanish civil engineer, mathematician, and inventor of the late 19th century and early 20th century. A member of the Royal Spanish Academy since 1920, he was also a corresponding member of the French Academy of Sciences, among other institutions. Torres was a prolific and versatile innovator in various fields of engineering, including mechanics, aeronautics and automatics. One of his greatest achievements was El Ajedrecista of 1912, an electromagnetic device capable of playing a limited form of chess that demonstrated the capability of machines to be programmed to follow specified rules (heuristics) and marked the beginnings of research into the development of artificial intelligence.