Alexander Kronrod

Home * People * Alexander Kronrod



Aleksandr (Alexander) Semenovich Kronrod, (October 22, 1921 – October 6, 1986)

was a Russian mathematician and computer scientist. Kronrod and his fellow Georgy Adelson-Velsky were the last students of Nikolai Luzin at Moscow State University. In the 50s and 60s Kronrod was professor and head of the Computational Laboratory at Moscows Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEF or ITEP). He was involved in developing the ITEP Chess Program in motivating his friends Georgy Adelson-Velsky and Alexander Brudno, as well in his proposal of a "general recursive search scheme". Kronrod is well known for saying, "chess is the Drosophila of artificial intelligence".

In 1965, while John McCarthy visited the Soviet Union, he was challenged by Kronrod, who considered the Kotok-McCarthy-Program to be the best program in the United States at the time. At the end of 1966 the four game match was arranged between Kotok-McCarthy, running on a IBM 7090 computer, and the ITEP Program on a Soviet M-2. The match played over nine months was won 3-1 by the ITEP Program.

=Quotes=

Competitions, Controversies, and Computer Chess
Quote from Competitions, Controversies, and Computer Chess :

This match has a very sad postscript: Alexander Kronrod, the head of the Computational lab at ITEP, was a highly principled person who, among with many other mathematicians, signed a letter in defense of Esenin-Volpin, a mathematician who was placed in an insane asylum for anti-Communist views. For his signature of the letter Kronrod was reprimanded by the Communist Party. The physicists at ITEP, who were irritated because computer time was “wasted” on game playing instead of their problems used the reprimand as an excuse to oust Kronrod from his position. At the same time Kronrod was fired from his professorship at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. These actions effectively ended the career of this brilliant mathematician.

What is AI?
=Selected Publications=
 * Alexander Kronrod (1965). Nodes and weights of quadrature formulas. Sixteen-place tables. New York: Consultants Bureau
 * Alexander Kronrod (196?). Conversations on Programming.

=External Links=
 * Alexander Kronrod from Wikipedia
 * The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Aleksandr Kronrod
 * Gauss–Kronrod quadrature formula - Wikipedia
 * Method of Four Russians from Wikipedia
 * KRONROD - Gauss-Kronrod Quadrature Rules, C++ library by Robert Piessens and Maria Branders
 * Биография А.С. Кронрода, Biography AS Kronrod by Alexander Yershov (translated by Google Translate)
 * Alexander Kronrod from Wikiquote
 * Science and Scholarship definition in the TheFreeDictionary.com, article from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979)

=References=

Up one level