Post #100

Chess is the Drosophila of Artificial Intelligence While writing another post on the life of Andrei Leman, I found that John McCarthy, the creator of Lisp, author of the term Artificial Intelligence, and one of the first and most influential programmers has an interesting remark, where he discusses the importance of long-term research. Apparently this saying, Chess is the Drosophila of Artificial Intelligence, is attributed to a legendary Soviet scientist, Alexander Kronrod, who arguably founded the first AI lab in the USSR. Back in '70s there were some huge ICL machines (analog of IBM machines), people used punch cards to provide the input, and calculations lasted for days, without the possibility to run a program in parallel. Yet, Kronrod's lab, which included Weisfeiler, Leman, and many other famous CS scientists and engineers, were working among others on the development of the chess programs, which in 1974, by the name Kaissa, won the first international chess tournament among machines.