Mikhail Botvinnik

Timeline

1. 1923–1931

   From school chess to engineering

   He learns chess in autumn 1923 at age twelve and qualifies for the USSR Championship final stage in 1927 as its youngest player to that date. In 1931, he wins his first Soviet Championship and graduates in electrical engineering.

2. 1937

   Candidate dissertation

   He defends a candidate dissertation in 1937 on excitation-voltage oscillations in synchronous machines.

3. 1941–1956

   Power engineering and doctoral work

   He heads the High Voltage Insulation Laboratory of the Perm Power System from 1941 to 1945. In 1951, he defends his doctoral dissertation on excitation control and static stability of synchronous machines. He joins the Research Institute for Electrical Energy as a senior research scientist in 1956.

4. 1948–1963

   Three reigns as world champion

   In 1948, Botvinnik wins the tournament of the world's five strongest players and becomes the sixth World Chess Champion. He loses the title to Vasily Smyslov in 1957 and Mikhail Tal in 1960, regains it in rematches in 1958 and 1961, and loses it for the final time to Tigran Petrosian in 1963.

5. 1963–1970

   Selective chess computing

   After losing the title in 1963, he turns to chess and computer science and aims to create an “electronic grandmaster.” His selective search uses general chess principles to choose moves worth examining, a method suited to the limited early Soviet computers. Springer publishes Computers, Chess and Long-Range Planning in 1970.

6. 1970s

   The Pioneer project

   In the 1970s, he leads a team that includes Boris Stilman, Alexander Yudin, Alexander Reznitskiy, Michael Tsfasman and Mikhail Chudakov on Pioneer, a Soviet AI project to model a chess master's thinking; the program takes its name in 1977. By the mid-1970s, brute-force search on faster computers outperforms his selective approach. A generalized decision method in Pioneer, with a few adjustments, plans maintenance of power stations across the USSR.

7. 1991

   Honorary degree from Ferrara

   The University of Ferrara awards him an honorary degree in mathematics in 1991 for his computer-chess research.

8. 1995

   Final computer projects and death

   In his eighties, he works on CC Sapiens in the 1990s with Vasily Vladimirov, Evgeniĭ Dmitrievich Cherevik and Vitaly Vygodsky. He funds an economic-computing project that he hopes will manage the Russian economy, using lecture and seminar earnings, and continues work on it until he dies in 1995.