Martin Gardner's 1975 chess-computer hoax appeared in which magazine?

Martin Gardner's 1975 chess-computer hoax appeared in Scientific American.

In an April 1975 piece, Gardner claimed that MIT had developed a chess program capable of identifying the best opening move. The fictional result was that “pawn to queen's rook four” was always the strongest first move. The claim was one of several fabricated breakthroughs presented in his April Fools' article.

Gardner wrote Scientific American's “Mathematical Games” column, which made him a trusted guide to puzzles, logic and recreational mathematics. That reputation helped the joke work: some readers treated the computer claim as plausible, and Gardner later recalled receiving serious reactions to the supposed chess result.

The article also mixed the chess story with other absurd claims, including fake discoveries involving relativity, map coloring and mathematics. The surrounding clues eventually made the joke clear, but the episode is remembered as an early example of a computer-chess hoax appearing in a respected science magazine—not as a genuine MIT experiment.