Spenlunking CACM, vol. 4 (1961): Soviet cybernetics and computer sciences, 1960

The January 1961 issue is dedicated mostly to compiler-related issues, especially ALGOL, though there are some articles on arithmetic and one on digital computers in universities; other issues from the same year include work on error correcting codes. One intriguing one talks about mathematical models for documentation and search. Algorithms are published en masse, with little commentary. Most are short subroutines for calculating mathematical functions. The July issue includes what might be the first publication of quicksort; I'm not enough of a historian on algorithms to say whether it's new here, or just published for the record. But the description is, um, terse:

That's it, that's the whole thing. No, I can't read it, either, and I think I know how quicksort works.

CACM, by now, features black and white photos on the cover. By 1961, we can say that CS research and the operation of ACM are in full swing. There is even a letters to the editor section; one February letter discusses an earlier article on multi-processing (contrasted, correctly, with multi-programming). There are a few women authors; Lynn could be either man or woman, but Joyce, Judith, Mary and Patty are unlikely to be men. (A noticeable number of authors use only initials, as well.) The names Wilkes, Hoare, Dijkstra flit past; and, for the first time, I spott Knuth's name as an author.

But one article in particular caught my eye.

Edward A. Feigenbaum, one of the founders of GOFAI, already a Berkeley professor at the time, visited the Soviet Union in 1960, and had some things to say about the state of their computing (and their ability or willingness to run an interesting conference). Interestingly, in 1982, Ed would be one of the prominent senior foreign guests at the first Fifth Generation computer conference held by ICOT in Japan.

In the article, "Soviet Cybernetics and Computer Sciences, 1960", Feigenbaum does quite a bit of complaining about the Soviets as hosts. The report is long and detailed (14 pages of 3-column text, no figures), covering his attendance as a delegate to the First International Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control.  If you read Russian (or use a translator), you can find a report at http://www.mathnet.ru/.

Feigenbaum objected to the style of the conference, referring to the "tedium" of each paper being followed by an extensive "discussion" that amounted to a further clarification or rebuttal of the paper. Again, here, he complained about the erratic performance of translators.

For Feigenbaum, and probably for his audience, the most interesting part was not the 400 papers presented by 1,200 delegates, but the individual visits he managed to make, seeing some Russians he already knew by name. However, he was stymied in his attempts to see others, and some of the ones he did get to meet offered him no interesting information. But he did manage to find some people working on speech, automated translation, brain simulation, and other AIish topics as well as mathematical computation.

He actually learned quite a bit about some of the computers themselves, including which ones were mature enough to handle a true compiler for a language.

He described the chess machine (by which I think he means JOHNNIAC running the Newell-Shaw-Simon program; he refers to the machine as "antediluvian") and geometry machine (Gelernter at IBM) then under development. Apparently, the optimists at the time believed that a chess machine would be (world?) champion by 1970 and would prove new mathematical theorems by 1970, as well.  The Soviets seemed to concur with that as a timeline, but were amazed that such impractical research was "allowed" in the U.S., and might even be conducted by capitalist corporations. Feigenbaum explained how foundations, corporations and the government support research, and the Soviets were reportedly impressed.

In the end, Feigenbaum concluded that 

I concur with the opinion of most U. S. computer scientists who have visited Russia that at present the United States has a definite lead over the Soviet Union in the design and production of computing machines, but that there is no gap in fundamental ideas,with the possible exception of the production of reliable transistors.With the importance of computers to modern science and technology, there is no doubt that fairly soon the Soviet Union will be producing as many computers as we do. To what extent they will utilize these computers effectively, and in what new ways, I have no immediate answer[.]

Of course, we now know that reliable translation has taken a further sixty years already, and performance is still spotty. I sometimes wonder how much of the complexity of such problems that people like Feigenbaum had accurately anticipated.