Apr 23, 2022
Scott Savage: Lefty, the Checkers Playing
Robot
"Lefty" was the name of the world's first checker-playing robot,
which was located at the Omniplex science museum in Oklahoma City,
Oklahoma. The robot arm would play games of checkers against museum
visitors, picking up and moving pieces on a physical checkerboard.
Lefty's game logic ran on an Atari 800 computer, which controlled
the robot through the joystick port. Lefty was programmed by Scott
Savage, the subject of today's interview.
Before the interview, Scott digitized his Atari cassette tape with
the code for Lefty. The tape had some problems, but Atari community
member "atarigrub" successfully recovered the data. Scott also
provided scans of several newspaper and magazine articles about
Lefty. Both the Lefty program and those articles are available at
Internet Archive.
Also, be sure to watch the only known video of Lefty in action:
Scott and Lefty appeared on the TV show "Dannysday" which aired on
KOCO TV in spring 1984.
This interview took place on April 14, 2022.
Scott and
Lefty on Dannysday TV show
Lefty
BASIC program and media mentions
Paper about Lefty (in Spanish)
Scott
Savage Techno Scavenger YouTube channel
Omniplex is now called
Science Museum Oklahoma
This interview on
YouTube