Post #124

A forgotten story of Soviet AI I found out about Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm about 5 years ago, and then sometime after I realized that both authors were from the USSR. That was quite unexpected. I started looking up information about the authors and found quite a good biography of Boris Weisfeiler, written by his sister, and not so much about Andrey Leman. About one year I was searching the people who knew him, one by one, who are now quite senior and don't use all fancy messengers, to find out more about his life. Finally, I gathered enough to write a post on his life, from interest in math olympiads to development of the first AI chess player, to working in Silicon Valley. His life is a symbol of generation of mathematicians of his time. Strong performance in math olympiads, competitive Moscow State University, working in the Institute of theoretical and experimental physics, and then emigration to the West, when the iron curtain collapsed. I like hearing these stories because it's reminiscent of stories of my parents and their friends-engineers. It's the voice of that time, that now is inevitably gone. Similar to the trip of Babai to the USSR, reading about these stories uncovers the foundations of graph theory, computer science and artificial intelligence that we study today and let us connect the dots between old and new approaches.