6 ms·

The Tangled History of Soviet Computer Science

68 points by BIackSwan 12y ago

centizen 12y ago
http://goo.gl/ca7UYP http://goo.gl/ca7UYP Mirror for anyone who's getting an error
agumonkey 12y ago
Love to hear relationship between governments and cybernetics in those days. Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn. The document counts toward the end is mindboggling. And the brezhnev story is delicious.
- innguest 12y ago
  > FTFA: "The project consisted of four modules: an economic simulator [...]" We have sophisticated physics simulators nowadays but no economic simulator to be found. It's almost as if all those economic formulae are a giant pretense and can't really provide a concrete explanation of how things work as required by algorithms (and people, but you can always fool people - you just can't fool computers).
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    Economic simulation is probably just below weather prediction... not really possible.
    - innguest 12y ago
      That's what I am arguing. :) But your comparison is unfair. It's not about weather prediction, I have no comments about that. But can't we simulate it? Yes we can, I play GTA, sometimes it's raining and my car skids more. That's weather simulation. Where's the economic simulation where I make interest rates negative and ...(fill in the blanks - who knows?)... that's why a simulator would really come in handy. The difference between physics and economics is physics can use its formulae to simulate what it claims to explain, while economics can't. That makes me think those two sets of formulae are not of the same breed.
      - agumonkey 12y ago
        GTA is a real time crippled approximation of physics, far from a simulation. Maybe economics have no 'one true' model from which equations can be derived, but even if there were such equations, the complexity wouldn't be manageable unless you reduce the precision to the point it's unreliable for real world usage.
        innguest 12y ago
        > GTA is a real time crippled approximation of physics, far from a simulation. Far? Cars skid in the water. They have different weights. The engine being on the front or on the back makes a difference in how the car drives. They have different acceleration speeds, different traction, and so on. It's pretty good, so I wouldn't call it "crippled". However, economics can't even make a simulator as good as GTA is for physics. That is pathetic and a testament to its quackery.
  - jloughry 12y ago
    There was an attempt made to build an economic simulator (really a special purpose analogue computer using water as the working medium) in the 1940s in New Zealand [1]. Terry Pratchett played with the concept in one of his books [2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer [2] Making Money (2007)
  - eru 12y ago
    All the hedge funds and banks are trying to run economics simulators. We are just much more aware of the limitations, and deal in probability distributions rather than concrete forecasts.
- m0skit0 12y ago
  Oh, never knew about Cybersyn, awesome discovery sir!
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Imagine if Cybersyn had access to IoT technologies.
    - Create 12y ago
      it does. its called GOOG AMAZN amongst others and gathering data for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosplan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosplan short story long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6EBpLfLHCA&index=1&list=PLC4E798CAE3E10597 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6EBpLfLHCA&index=1&list=PLC...
jordigh 12y ago
I didn't read the article, but I just wanted to take the occasion to remind people that the Soviets also built ternary computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer
- agentcoops 12y ago
  This article is really a rather sloppy piece that contributes little to our understanding of what should be fascinating to this community: alternative histories and possibilities of the computer. For example, how cybernetics and "use of the computer" are used almost interchangeably. A critique of cybernetics, which is in fact somewhere in-between a political program and philosophical system, can in no way be equated with a critique of the computer. In fact, a critique of cybernetics as at once idealist (vs materialist) and mechanistic (vs organic/vitalist) is a very sensible philosophical critique and in no way a contradictory legacy of mere soviet ideology, however philosophically problematic the latter may itself be. Many of the decisions to avoid anthropomorphizing the computer are similar to arguments put forth by Djikstra for perspective. Historically, how is it even possible that this article doesn't mention someone like Sergei Lebedev, a celebrated Soviet scientist, who had a working computer by the 50s which had been in development since the mid-to-late 40s? Or a figure like Victor Shestakov who independently made many of the same innovations as Claude Shannon? As a community, I think we should be very interested in other ways the computer could have been---at the level of use, hardware and software---thus histories like this or the Japanese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer should be fascinating, even if one finds much about the Soviet Union problematic to say the least. On the cybernetics point, I would also highly recommend reading Bogdanov's science fiction novel Red Star, written in 1908 (obviously in-between the two revolutions, so technically pre-Soviet, but he was important in defining many philosophical and technical programs in the Soviet Union, notably space flight), for a fascinating account of a utopian intertwining of statistics, computer-like devices, and the life of a planet. Absolutely materialist and organic/vitalist rather than idealist and mechanistic!
  - agentcoops 12y ago
    As a follow-up, I highly recommend http://monoskop.org/Computing_and_cybernetics_in_CEE#Episodes http://monoskop.org/Computing_and_cybernetics_in_CEE#Episode... as a much more detailed account of the history of Soviet hardware and thought about computing, including even the relation to cybernetics.
m0skit0 12y ago
The nomenklatura would invent the most ridiculous arguments ("Condemned as a capitalist tool") to avoid any criticism, to suit their planned programs, corruption, and unjustified spendings.
- brudgers 12y ago
  replacing class-conscious workers and human soldiers—who could choose not to fight for the bourgeoisie—with obedient robots. The correctness of politics aside and in regard to labor economics, that wasn't a particularly inaccurate prediction of the computing technology's arc under the pressure of capitalism's logic.
- M8 12y ago
  Yeah, reminds me of USA spying on everyone "to prevent terrorist attacks".
- avdicius 12y ago
  This might be surprising but planned programs of the pesky corrupted nomenklatura sometimes used some science and computing as well. Look at this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Kantorovich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Kantorovich He received Nobel prize and (horror!) Stalin prize for his work in mathematics and using mathematics for evil planning of economic programs.
  - m0skit0 12y ago
    "(horror!) Stalin prize" "using mathematics for evil planning of economic programs" I hope this is ironic.
jnd5000 12y ago
There's a great novel, _Red Plenty_, by Francis Spufford, that touches on Soviet computing in the 50s and 60s as part of a broader exploration of Soviet economic planning. I wish more people would read it. It's a weird hybrid of reportage and fiction -- and almost seems science fictional in its world building. Here's a link to the Guardian's review: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/red-plenty-francis-spufford http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/red-plenty-fran...
- pja 12y ago
  Red Plenty is fantastic. Well worth reading. There was a virtual seminar at the Crooked Timber group blog which is worth reading if you enjoyed the book: http://crookedtimber.org/category/red-plenty-seminar/ http://crookedtimber.org/category/red-plenty-seminar/
thomasjames 12y ago
This reads like an Adam Curtis documentary (a good thing), and several of the episodes of more famous documentaries touch upon some of the themes here. The episode of "Pandora's Box" called "The Engineer's Plot" describes the rise of cybernetic thinking in the Soviet Union--less so the early resistance to it. It describes some of the insane rituals that developed out of the entrenched management hierarchies that computing was grafted on to. It effectively shows the endgame of the Soviet cybernetic experiment. More recently, the episode "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts" of the documentary series "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" describes the development of cybernetics in the US and the resistance to it from environmentalists (outside the scope of the article). It gives portraits of some of the main characters this article talks about, though.
toolsadmin 12y ago
Anybody see parallels between this and Stem cell research?
avdicius 12y ago
I'm puzzled this article has "history" in the title. It would be more appropriately called "a few funny fiction stories and some cheap spin-doctoring on soviet computer science." Somehow it does not mention this guy, who could be called Soviet von Neumann: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Alexeyevich_Lebedev http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Alexeyevich_Lebedev On the other hand it does not mention von Neumann either, it talks about Norbert Wiener, whose theories have doubtful contribution to computer science. The critical articles about his theories in Soviet media were pretty ridiculous, but hardly had any effect on the development of computers or control theory in SU. The author mentions nobody else relevant to the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Ershov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Ershov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgy_Adelson-Velsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgy_Adelson-Velsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Lyapunov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Lyapunov https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2,_%D0%93%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%BD_%D0%A1%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B5... Perhaps the author took inspiration for his article from the worst examples of Soviet propaganda. Twisting the facts, mixing them with fiction in such a way that is hard to tell one from another.
- Alex_Notchenko 12y ago
  Article doesn't have "history" in it's title, HN submission has. Title on site is "How the Computer Got Its Revenge on the Soviet Union". > some cheap spin-doctoring on soviet computer science this article is actually reworked version of "Gerovitch, Slava. "InterNyet: why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network." History and Technology 24.4 (2008): 335-350." which has a lot of reference and citations. And article main subject is not history of computer science in USSR, it's about problems of creating huge computer networks in particular political-ideological environment. I don't see how this attempt of informing about attempts of creating Internet in USSR diminishes achievements of great Scientists that you've mentioned. It mentions "MESM", which was created by Lebedev, it's certainly close enough without changing the subject of article. > Twisting the facts, mixing them with fiction in such a way that is hard to tell one from another. Where exactly fact twisting is in the article? [0] http://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterNyet.pdf http://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterNy...
Mister_Snuggles 12y ago
Here is another article on the history of Soviet computing: http://www.sigcis.org/?q=node/85 http://www.sigcis.org/?q=node/85

68 points by BIackSwan 12y ago

http://goo.gl/ca7UYP http://goo.gl/ca7UYP Mirror for anyone who's getting an error

Love to hear relationship between governments and cybernetics in those days. Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn. The document counts toward the end is mindboggling. And the brezhnev story is delicious.

innguest 12y ago
> FTFA: "The project consisted of four modules: an economic simulator [...]" We have sophisticated physics simulators nowadays but no economic simulator to be found. It's almost as if all those economic formulae are a giant pretense and can't really provide a concrete explanation of how things work as required by algorithms (and people, but you can always fool people - you just can't fool computers).
- agumonkey 12y ago
  Economic simulation is probably just below weather prediction... not really possible.
  - innguest 12y ago
    That's what I am arguing. :) But your comparison is unfair. It's not about weather prediction, I have no comments about that. But can't we simulate it? Yes we can, I play GTA, sometimes it's raining and my car skids more. That's weather simulation. Where's the economic simulation where I make interest rates negative and ...(fill in the blanks - who knows?)... that's why a simulator would really come in handy. The difference between physics and economics is physics can use its formulae to simulate what it claims to explain, while economics can't. That makes me think those two sets of formulae are not of the same breed.
    - agumonkey 12y ago
      GTA is a real time crippled approximation of physics, far from a simulation. Maybe economics have no 'one true' model from which equations can be derived, but even if there were such equations, the complexity wouldn't be manageable unless you reduce the precision to the point it's unreliable for real world usage.
      - innguest 12y ago
        > GTA is a real time crippled approximation of physics, far from a simulation. Far? Cars skid in the water. They have different weights. The engine being on the front or on the back makes a difference in how the car drives. They have different acceleration speeds, different traction, and so on. It's pretty good, so I wouldn't call it "crippled". However, economics can't even make a simulator as good as GTA is for physics. That is pathetic and a testament to its quackery.
- jloughry 12y ago
  There was an attempt made to build an economic simulator (really a special purpose analogue computer using water as the working medium) in the 1940s in New Zealand [1]. Terry Pratchett played with the concept in one of his books [2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer [2] Making Money (2007)
- eru 12y ago
  All the hedge funds and banks are trying to run economics simulators. We are just much more aware of the limitations, and deal in probability distributions rather than concrete forecasts.
m0skit0 12y ago
Oh, never knew about Cybersyn, awesome discovery sir!
- walterbell 12y ago
  Imagine if Cybersyn had access to IoT technologies.
  - Create 12y ago
    it does. its called GOOG AMAZN amongst others and gathering data for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosplan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosplan short story long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6EBpLfLHCA&index=1&list=PLC4E798CAE3E10597 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6EBpLfLHCA&index=1&list=PLC...

jordigh 12y ago

I didn't read the article, but I just wanted to take the occasion to remind people that the Soviets also built ternary computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer

agentcoops 12y ago
This article is really a rather sloppy piece that contributes little to our understanding of what should be fascinating to this community: alternative histories and possibilities of the computer. For example, how cybernetics and "use of the computer" are used almost interchangeably. A critique of cybernetics, which is in fact somewhere in-between a political program and philosophical system, can in no way be equated with a critique of the computer. In fact, a critique of cybernetics as at once idealist (vs materialist) and mechanistic (vs organic/vitalist) is a very sensible philosophical critique and in no way a contradictory legacy of mere soviet ideology, however philosophically problematic the latter may itself be. Many of the decisions to avoid anthropomorphizing the computer are similar to arguments put forth by Djikstra for perspective. Historically, how is it even possible that this article doesn't mention someone like Sergei Lebedev, a celebrated Soviet scientist, who had a working computer by the 50s which had been in development since the mid-to-late 40s? Or a figure like Victor Shestakov who independently made many of the same innovations as Claude Shannon? As a community, I think we should be very interested in other ways the computer could have been---at the level of use, hardware and software---thus histories like this or the Japanese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer should be fascinating, even if one finds much about the Soviet Union problematic to say the least. On the cybernetics point, I would also highly recommend reading Bogdanov's science fiction novel Red Star, written in 1908 (obviously in-between the two revolutions, so technically pre-Soviet, but he was important in defining many philosophical and technical programs in the Soviet Union, notably space flight), for a fascinating account of a utopian intertwining of statistics, computer-like devices, and the life of a planet. Absolutely materialist and organic/vitalist rather than idealist and mechanistic!
- agentcoops 12y ago
  As a follow-up, I highly recommend http://monoskop.org/Computing_and_cybernetics_in_CEE#Episodes http://monoskop.org/Computing_and_cybernetics_in_CEE#Episode... as a much more detailed account of the history of Soviet hardware and thought about computing, including even the relation to cybernetics.

m0skit0 12y ago

The nomenklatura would invent the most ridiculous arguments ("Condemned as a capitalist tool") to avoid any criticism, to suit their planned programs, corruption, and unjustified spendings.

brudgers 12y ago
replacing class-conscious workers and human soldiers—who could choose not to fight for the bourgeoisie—with obedient robots. The correctness of politics aside and in regard to labor economics, that wasn't a particularly inaccurate prediction of the computing technology's arc under the pressure of capitalism's logic.
M8 12y ago
Yeah, reminds me of USA spying on everyone "to prevent terrorist attacks".
avdicius 12y ago
This might be surprising but planned programs of the pesky corrupted nomenklatura sometimes used some science and computing as well. Look at this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Kantorovich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Kantorovich He received Nobel prize and (horror!) Stalin prize for his work in mathematics and using mathematics for evil planning of economic programs.
- m0skit0 12y ago
  "(horror!) Stalin prize" "using mathematics for evil planning of economic programs" I hope this is ironic.

jnd5000 12y ago

There's a great novel, _Red Plenty_, by Francis Spufford, that touches on Soviet computing in the 50s and 60s as part of a broader exploration of Soviet economic planning. I wish more people would read it. It's a weird hybrid of reportage and fiction -- and almost seems science fictional in its world building. Here's a link to the Guardian's review: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/red-plenty-francis-spufford http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/red-plenty-fran...

pja 12y ago
Red Plenty is fantastic. Well worth reading. There was a virtual seminar at the Crooked Timber group blog which is worth reading if you enjoyed the book: http://crookedtimber.org/category/red-plenty-seminar/ http://crookedtimber.org/category/red-plenty-seminar/

thomasjames 12y ago

This reads like an Adam Curtis documentary (a good thing), and several of the episodes of more famous documentaries touch upon some of the themes here. The episode of "Pandora's Box" called "The Engineer's Plot" describes the rise of cybernetic thinking in the Soviet Union--less so the early resistance to it. It describes some of the insane rituals that developed out of the entrenched management hierarchies that computing was grafted on to. It effectively shows the endgame of the Soviet cybernetic experiment. More recently, the episode "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts" of the documentary series "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" describes the development of cybernetics in the US and the resistance to it from environmentalists (outside the scope of the article). It gives portraits of some of the main characters this article talks about, though.

toolsadmin 12y ago

Anybody see parallels between this and Stem cell research?

avdicius 12y ago

I'm puzzled this article has "history" in the title. It would be more appropriately called "a few funny fiction stories and some cheap spin-doctoring on soviet computer science." Somehow it does not mention this guy, who could be called Soviet von Neumann: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Alexeyevich_Lebedev http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Alexeyevich_Lebedev On the other hand it does not mention von Neumann either, it talks about Norbert Wiener, whose theories have doubtful contribution to computer science. The critical articles about his theories in Soviet media were pretty ridiculous, but hardly had any effect on the development of computers or control theory in SU. The author mentions nobody else relevant to the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Ershov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Ershov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgy_Adelson-Velsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgy_Adelson-Velsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Lyapunov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Lyapunov https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2,_%D0%93%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%BD_%D0%A1%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B5... Perhaps the author took inspiration for his article from the worst examples of Soviet propaganda. Twisting the facts, mixing them with fiction in such a way that is hard to tell one from another.

Alex_Notchenko 12y ago
Article doesn't have "history" in it's title, HN submission has. Title on site is "How the Computer Got Its Revenge on the Soviet Union". > some cheap spin-doctoring on soviet computer science this article is actually reworked version of "Gerovitch, Slava. "InterNyet: why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network." History and Technology 24.4 (2008): 335-350." which has a lot of reference and citations. And article main subject is not history of computer science in USSR, it's about problems of creating huge computer networks in particular political-ideological environment. I don't see how this attempt of informing about attempts of creating Internet in USSR diminishes achievements of great Scientists that you've mentioned. It mentions "MESM", which was created by Lebedev, it's certainly close enough without changing the subject of article. > Twisting the facts, mixing them with fiction in such a way that is hard to tell one from another. Where exactly fact twisting is in the article? [0] http://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterNyet.pdf http://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterNy...

Mister_Snuggles 12y ago

Here is another article on the history of Soviet computing: http://www.sigcis.org/?q=node/85 http://www.sigcis.org/?q=node/85