Anatoliy Petrovych Mitskevich (17 November 1919 – 7 October 1975), known by the pen name Anatoly Dneprov (also Dnieprov), was a Soviet cyberneticist and science fiction writer. His science fiction stories were published in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the United States from 1958 to 1970.
Career Anatoly Dneprov's career included work at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
The Progress Publishers, Moscow wrote of him:
Algis Budrys compared his short story "The Purple Mummy" to that of Eando Binder.
Many of his predictions about artificial intelligence, self-replicating machines, human cloning, and other subjects were highly prescient.Дмитрий Старицкий, Анатолий Днепров. Импульс "третьей волны"
Books There is a number of collections of Dneprov's novels and short stories. Уравнения Максвелла: Сборник научно-фантастических повестей и рассказов. — М.: Молодая гвардия, 1960. — 128 с. Мир, в котором я исчез: Научно-фантастические повести и рассказы. — М.: Молодая гвардия, 1962. — 104 с. Формула бессмертия: Научно-фантастические повести и рассказы. — М.: Молодая гвардия, 1963. — 160 с. Пурпурная мумия: [Повести, рассказы]. — М.: Детская литература, 1965. — 286 с. — (Библиотека приключений и научной фантастики). Пророки: [Повести, рассказы, статьи]. — М.: Знание, 1971. — 304 с. Формула бессмертия: Научно-фантастические повести и рассказы. — М.: Молодая гвардия, 1972. — 400 с. — (Библиотека советской фантастики). Глиняный бог. — М.: АСТ, 2003. — 800 с. — (Классика отечественной фантастики). — ISBN 5-17-018690-8.
Selected stories "Shipwreck" (1958) "Crabs on the Island" (1958)
"The Maxwell Equations" (1960)
"The World in Which I Disappeared" (1961) "The Game" (1961) "The Purple Mummy" (1961)
"The Formula For Immortality" (1962) "When Questions Are Asked" (1963) "Prophets" (1970)
"The Game" Dneprov's short story "The Game" (1961) anticipates the later China brain and Chinese room thought experiments. It concerns a stadium of people who act as switches and memory cells implementing a program to translate a sentence from Portuguese (a language that none of them know) to Russian. The plot of the story goes as follows: all 1400 delegates of the Soviet Congress of Young Mathematicians willingly agree to take part in a "purely mathematical game" proposed by professor Zarubin. The game requires the execution of a certain set of rules given to the participants, who communicate with each other using sentences composed only of the words "zero" and "one". After several hours of playing the game, the participants have no idea what is going on as they get progressively tired. One girl becomes too dizzy and leaves the game just before it ends. On the next day, Zarubin reveals to everyone's excitement that the participants were simulating an existing 1961 Soviet computer named Ural that translated a Portuguese sentence "Os maiores resultados são produzidos por pequenos mas contínuos esforços," into Russian "Величайшие результаты достигаются небольшими, но постоянными усидрмки" (The greatest goals are achieved through minor but continuous ekkedt). It becomes clear that the last word, which should have been "усилиями" (efforts), is mistranslated due to the dizzy girl leaving the simulation.
The philosophical argument developed by Dneprov is presented in the form of Socratic dialogue. Consequently, the main conclusion from the Portuguese stadium is contained in the final words of the main character, Professor Zarubin: "I think our game gave us the right answer to the question 'Can machines think?' We have proven that even the most perfect simulation of machine thinking is not the thinking process itself."
Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem summarizes Dneprov's argument in his book Summa Technologiae (1964) as follows:
See also Soviet science fiction
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