AI before AI: The forgotten Soviet programme (1/2)

American chess genius Bobby Fischer defeated the reigning world champion Russia's Boris Spassky in 1972 in what has been called "the most exciting world chess championship ever". But the Eastern Bloc got its revenge on August 8, 1974, when Kaissa, a Soviet computer, checkmated its opponent, securing the very first World Computer Chess Championship title for the Soviet Union. Russian artificial intelligence had crushed its capitalist competitor. The victory proved to the world that the Soviets also had a say in the field of AI, which had until then mostly been developed at top US universities. Read moreFormer USSR chess grandmaster Boris Spassky dies at 88 AI, a ‘bourgeois science’? In the early 1950s, AI – which was not yet known by that name – was viewed behind the Iron Curtain with suspicion. The Soviets viewed what was to become AI primarily through the lens of cybernetics, a field of research that was very much in vogue for studying human-to-machine or machine-to-machine behaviour. Some saw cybernetics as a “false bourgeois science”, while others thought it held great promise for scientific advancement. Read morePublishers sue Google over alleged use of books to train AI models...