Alexander Brudno

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Alexander Brudno

Alexander L'vovich Brudno, (Александр Львович Брудно, January 10, 1918 – December 1, 2009)
was a Russian Jewish mathematician, computer scientist and computer chess pioneer. He received his Ph.D. on Real functions at Moscow State University under advisor Dmitrii Menshov . Brudno independently discovered the alpha-beta algorithm, published 1963 in Problemy Kibernetiki . The algorithm was implemented inside the ITEP Chess Program, which was written by Georgy Adelson-Velsky and others at Alexander Kronrod's laboratory at Moscow’s Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEF or ITEP).

Brudno, also at ITEP at that time was a personal and like­minded friend of Kronrod . According to Monroe Newborn, Alexander Brudno led the team that created the chess program Kaissa at Moscow’s Institute of Control Sciences . From 1991 until his death he lived in Israel .

Quotes

John McCarthy

Quote by John McCarthy from Human-Level AI is harder than it seemed in 1955 on the Dartmouth workshop:

Chess programs catch some of the human chess playing abilities but rely on the limited effective branching of the chess move tree. The ideas that work for chess are inadequate for go. Alpha-beta pruning characterizes human play, but it wasn't noticed by early chess programmers - Turing, Shannon, Pasta and Ulam, and Bernstein. We humans are not very good at identifying the heuristics we ourselves use. Approximations to alpha-beta used by Samuel, Newell and Simon, McCarthy. Proved equivalent to minimax by Hart and Levin, independently by Brudno. Knuth gives details.

Ershov and Shura-Bura

Quote from The Early Development of Programming in the USSR by Andrey Ershov and Mikhail R. Shura-Bura

At the end of the 1950's a group of Moscow mathematicians began a study of computerized chess. Sixteen years later, the studies would lead to victory in the first world chess tournament for computer programs held in Stockholm during the 1974 IFIP Congress. An important component of this success was a deep study of the problems of information organization in computer memory and of various search heuristics. G. M. Adelson-Velsky and E. M. Landis invented the binary search tree ("dichotomic inquiry") and A. L. Brudno, independent of J. McCarthy, discovered the (α,β)-heuristic for reducing search times on a game tree.

Landis and Yaglom

Quote from Remembering A.S. Kronrod by Evgenii Landis and Isaak Yaglom :

Only in 1955 did a real opportunity arise for A.S. Kronrod to work with an electronic computer. It was the M­2 computer constructed by I.S. Bruk, M.A. Kartsev, and N.Ya. Matyukhin in the laboratory of the Institute of Energy named after Krzhizhanovsky and directed by I.S. Bruk. This laboratory later became the to Institute for Electronic Control Machines. The mathematics/machine interface was developed by A.L. Brudno, a great personal and like­minded friend of A.S. Kronrod.

When he started with enthusiasm to program the M­2 machine, A.S. Kronrod quickly came to the conclusion that computing is not the main application of computers. The main goal is to teach the computer to think, i.e., what is now called "artificial intelligence" and in those days "heuristic programming".

A.S. Kronrod captivated a large group of mathematicians and physicists (G.M. Adelson ­Velsky, A.L. Brudno, M.M. Bongard, E.M. Landis, N.N. Konstantinov, and others). Although some of them had arrived at this kind of problems on their own, they unconditionally accepted his leadership. In the room next to the one housing the M­2 machine the work of the new Kronrod seminar started. At the gatherings there were heated discussions on pattern recognition problems (this work was led by M.M. Bongard; versions of his program "Kora" are still functioning), transportation problems (the problem was introduced to the seminar and actively worked on by A.L. Brudno), problems of automata theory, and many other problems.

Mikhail Donskoy

Quote from Mikhail Donskoy's life cycle of a programmer :

When I was in high school I learned to program on the M-20 ... In the group of programmers at Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, where computing work was done on nuclear physics on the M-20, they came up with arrays, lists, the need for subroutines and more. One of my teachers, Georgy Adelson-Velsky came up with a hash memory. Details can be found in another of my teachers - Alexander Kronrod "Conversations about programming". Even before Dijkstra's basic principles of structured programming was known, Alexander Brudno published the book "Programming in meaningful notation." There was also created the first chess program ... The chess program ITEP, the predecessor of Kaissa fit in memory of M-20, namely in 4096 cells, each of which has a 48-bit ...

See also

• History of Computer Chess
• History of Alpha-Beta

Selected Publications

• Alexander Brudno (1963). Bounds and valuations for shortening the search of estimates. Problemy Kibernetiki (10) 141–150 and Problems of Cybernetics (10) 225–241
• Alexander Brudno (1968). Programming in meaningful notation. Second edition, revised (Программирование в содержательных обозначениях)
• Alexander Brudno, L.I. Kaplan (1990). Moscow Programming Contest. (Московские олимпиады по программированию) Popular scientific publication

External Links

• Alexander Brudno from Wikipedia

Брудно, Александр Львович - Материал из Википедии (Russian)

• The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Aleksandr Brudno
• Competitions, Controversies, and Computer Chess (pdf) by Michael Brudno (May 2000)
• Brudno Family

References

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