Essays on Automatics
Leonardo Torres Quevedo's 1914 paper, which sketched an electromechanical analytical engine with floating-point arithmetic — and claimed machines could exercise a kind of judgement.
In Ensayos sobre Automática the Spaniard Torres Quevedo carried Babbage's idea forward: he proposed replacing gears with electromechanics, described a floating-point format decades before EDVAC, and argued that a machine could make decisions through conditional branching. The paper included a full schematic example of an arithmetic automaton.
He never built the machine, but he demonstrated the principles in his chess-playing automaton El Ajedrecista. The essay is read today as one of the most far-sighted texts in the history of computing — and as a reminder of how much was thought through before the first real computers existed.