| Anatoly Dneprov | |
| Native Name: | Анатолій Петрович Міцкевич |
| Native Name Lang: | Russian |
| Birth Name: | Anatoliy Petrovych Mitskevitch |
| Birth Date: | 17 November 1919 |
| Birth Place: | Ekaterinoslav |
| Death Place: | Moscow |
| Nationality: | Soviet Ukrainian |
| Fields: | science-fiction prose, cybernetics |
| Alma Mater: | Moscow State University |
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Anatoly Dneprov (also spelled Anatoly Dnieprov, Ukrainian: Анатолій Дніпров|translit=Anatoliy Dniprov, pseudonym; real name Anatoliy Petrovych Mitskevitch, ; 1919–1975) was a Soviet physicist, cyberneticist and writer of Ukrainian ancestry. His science fiction stories were published in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the United States from 1958 to 1970.
Anatoly Dneprov was a physicist who worked 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.
His predictions about artificial intelligence, self-replicating machines, human clones, etc. are uncanny.[1]
Dneprov's short story The Game (1961) presents a scenario, the Portuguese stadium, anticipating 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 in Portuguese, a language that none of them know. 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, Professor Zarubin reveals to everyone's excitement that the participants were simulating an existing 1961 Soviet computing machine named "Ural" that translated a sentence written in Portuguese "Os maiores resultados são produzidos por – pequenos mas contínuos esforços," a language that nobody from the participants understood, into the sentence in Russian "The greatest goals are achieved through minor but continuous ekkedt", a language that everyone from the participants understood. It becomes clear that the last word, which should have been "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: