One of the earliest robots was the Mechanical Turk. The Mechanical Turk faced many chess players in the 18th Century. The mechanism consisted of a box, a humanoid robot, and a chessboard. Over the course of 84 years it beat most of its opponents including Benjamin Franklin. It was also a total fake. The mechanism behind the Mechanical Turk remains a mystery. Not so with this project from ricpd that features a very real robot arm that may well beat you at chess. Here’s more from hackster.io:

I wanted to build a chess robot that could play and beat me. I had previously made one using a commercial kit (AL5D) but it is quite expensive. And so I decided to 3D-print a robot and rewrite my code for it…. The human, playing white, makes a move. This is detected by the visual recognition system. The robot then ponders and then makes its move.

….Because the human’s move is recognised by a vision system, no special chess board hardware (such as reed switches, or whatever) is needed.

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