Make the Right Moves in This Chess History Quiz

Created in the 1770s, the Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing machine, taking the shape of a metal-and-wood man moved by a complex cog-and-gear system. The automaton was supposedly able to play chess at the highest level, defeating the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte during its many tours of Europe. Yet the Mechanical Turk was, in fact, a hoax. During games, a chess master was squeezed into a box below it, observing the pieces with hidden magnets, controlling the automaton, and choosing its moves.

Marcel Duchamp was a world-famous Dada artist in the early 20th century, but his true love was chess. In 1919, he said, "Nothing in the world interests me more than finding the right move... I like painting less and less." While he never did quit art to become a pro chess player, he seemed to reconcile the two, saying that "while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."

Shogi is a traditional chess-style game from Japan. Much like chess, shogi has pieces that can move in different ways, offering deep strategy and tactics for advanced players. As in traditional Western chess, the goal of shogi is to capture the opponent's king. However, the Japanese game differs greatly in some respects: For one a player has the option to bring one of their previously captured pieces back into play.

As noted, before our modern version of chess came the ancient Indian game of chaturanga. While not all of its rules are known today, we do know that it had a few different pieces than today's chess. One of those was the elephant, or “alfil,” which could move diagonally two squares, jumping over the middle square. That capability made it a strange and relatively weak piece, and it eventually evolved into the diagonally moving bishop we know today.

Many founding fathers were chess players, including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who even played together. It was Ben Franklin who wrote on the subject, however, in his essay "The Morals of Chess." In it, the Pennsylvanian polymath espoused the benefits of the royal game, writing "Chess is not merely an idle amusement." He wrote that playing chess teaches us foresight, circumspection, and caution, because "life is a kind of chess."

Chess is an old international game with roots stretching back hundreds of years through India and Persia. One remnant of this history is the word "checkmate," which comes from the Persian "shāh māt," which loosely translates to “the king is dead.” Alternate translations include "the king cannot escape" or “the king is frozen” — a pretty accurate description of an actual checkmate in chess.

The ancient Indian game of chaturanga is widely considered to be the primary ancestor of the game of chess. The two have many similarities: Both are played on an 8x8 board, both are simulations of war, and the games have pieces that move similarly. In chaturanga, there are kings, ministers, horses, chariots, foot soldiers, and more, which have a variety of movement options. Like chess, the game is won or lost by checkmating the king.

U.S. grandmaster Bobby Fischer took on the Soviet champion Boris Spassky in 1972 at the height of the Cold War. Across the globe, millions of people followed the "Match of the Century" to determine the world chess champion. After 21 brutal games, Fischer defeated Spassky with a score of 12.5-8.5 in one of the sport's most memorable marathons. That was the last official match Fischer played before he disappeared from the public eye.

In 1997, world champion chess player Garry Kasparov faced off against an unusual competitor: a supercomputer. Deep Blue, designed by scientists at IBM, was the best chess-playing program in history at the time, and it was put to the test against the game's winningest human. Although Kasparov had defeated Deep Blue a year earlier, he lost by a score of 3.5-2.5 in their second highly publicized six-game match.

In the world of chess, the highest title that can be bestowed upon a player, other than world champion, is grandmaster. The honor is awarded by the FIDE, the governing body of the sport of chess. The earliest recorded use of the term dates back at least until 1914, when it was used by Russian Tsar Nicholas II during the St. Petersburg chess tournament. Today, there are roughly 1,700 grandmasters worldwide.