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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aleksandr Kronrod | 2/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Kronrod | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T17:49:58.300343+00:00 | kb-cron |
== Artificial intelligence == Kronrod had a profound interest in artificial intelligence known in the USSR at the time as heuristic programming. He is well known for saying, "chess is the Drosophila of artificial intelligence." This quote graces the top of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence "Games & Puzzles" chess home page. In 1965, ITEP challenged and in 1966–1967 defeated the American chess program Kotok-McCarthy. The developers included Adelson-Velsky who used Alexander Brudno's adversarial search algorithm and a "general recursive search scheme" by Kronrod. They were advised by Russian chess master A.R. Bitman and world champion Mikhail Botvinnik in what was the first test of Shannon brute force vs. selective search. Kronrod's participation came at great cost. The physics users at ITEP complained, thinking that the lab was being used for game playing, when the division was writing the Crazy Eights card game and chess trying to teach a machine to think.
== End of a career == When the Communist Party reprimanded him in 1968 for cosigning a letter with many mathematicians in defense of the mathematician and logician Alexander Esenin-Volpin, a son of the poet Sergei Yesenin, the physicists were able to oust him from ITEP. He was also fired from his professorship. He then directed the mathematics laboratory at the Central Scientific Research Institute of Patent Information (CNIIPI) where he proposed patent reform to stimulate inventions. After gaining support he lost this position to an unsympathetic director. His last position was heading a Central Geophysical Expedition laboratory that processed drilling data where he made calculations for gas and oil exploration, but he was not challenged by this work. He re-examined his goals and soon changed course.
== Medicine == Kronrod decided that his best work was to help others and most importantly the terminally ill. He spent his fortune developing milil from a sour milk extract for cancer patients, to fill a shortage of anabol, an expensive drug developed in small quantities by his acquaintance Bogdanov in Bulgaria. He was promised but never acquired an animal testing laboratory so he tested the medicine on himself. Kronrod had no medical degree but he was well-informed in medicine and administered his treatments with the assistance of physicians. Milil was a last resort for seriously ill patients and was administered by physicians; in one case in a hospital ward A.A. Vishnevskiy reserved for treatments by Kronrod's method. Kronrod himself never gave the drug to patients and through physicians gave it away free. The drug was unapproved and a criminal case was brought against him. He regained his research records when a relative of the plaintiff required milil for treatment and the case was dismissed.
== Strokes and death == He slowly recovered when a stroke took his speech and ability to read and write but was forced to resign at the Central Geophysical Expedition and stop all work on math. He saved his own life by asking to be soaked in a tub of very hot water for several hours after a second stroke. He died on 6 October 1986 of a third stroke.
== Notes ==
== References == E. M. Landis, I. M. Yaglom (2001). "About Aleksandr Semenovich Kronrod". Russian Math. Surveys. 56 (5): 993–1007. doi:10.1070/RM2001v056n05ABEH000448. (also available in Russian)
== External links ==
Aleksandr Kronrod at the Mathematics Genealogy Project