First Decades: The Soviet Era

As of now, Russian researchers do not typically make the lists of major newsmakers when it comes to Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, this trend is being rapidly reversed, and the home country of the first world champion in computer chess games and inventors of the mathematical learning theory will soon very likely catch up with the very best in both the academia and the industry.

The first attempts at what can be called “AI before AI” can be traced back to the 1820s to 1830s Russia, when, concurrently with Ada Lovelace, Semyon N. Korsakov proposed a series of mechanical machines for “enhancing natural intelligence” through “comparison of ideas” (Karsakoff 1832) to the Imperial Academy of Science in St. Petersburg. In modern terms, Korsakov’s ideoscope could compute set-theoretic intersection and complement (which gives a complete set of Boolean functions) over data given by object-attribute tables implemented by punched cards. Unlike Jaccard machines driven by programs on punched cards— the precursors of machines with numerical control— Korsakov's ideoscope was intended for information processing with symbolic computation, such as checking the similarity, difference, search, and classification. Like toy steam engines designed in ancient Greece, these inventions were hardly technologically scalable and did not meet societal needs of the day, so they sank into oblivion till the rise of the computer era in the 1950s.

It is worth mentioning that Soviet and Russian researchers of the twentieth century would often not claim that they “were doing AI,” so our classification follows the modern view of what is AI. AI, as a striking term motivating better fund raising in Western countries, was under suspicion (not always ideological) in Soviet science, which tried to keep to deeper-grounded nomenclature of science branches, with a sort of Arbor Porphyriana as the archetype of classification of things. In 1954, two years before the now-famous Dortmund seminar, where the name Artificial Intelligence was coined, A. A. Lyapunov started his seminar “Automata and Thinking” at Moscow State University. The event featured physiologists, linguists, psychologists, and mathematicians, and arguably marked the start of AI research in Soviet Russia. Back in the day, AI was considered as a branch of cybernetics.