Anatoly Dneprov (writer)

Anatoly Dneprov (also spelled Anatoly Dnieprov, Анатолій Дніпров, pseudonym; real name Anatoliy Petrovych Mitskevitch, Анатолій Петрович Міцкевич; 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.

Career
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.

Significance
The Progress Publishers, Moscow wrote of him: "His favourite subject is cybernetics – its amazing achievements to date and its breath-taking potentialities. Scientific authenticity is a salient feature of his writings." 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.

Selected works
"'Why not? Any machine tool, a lathe, for example, makes parts for lathes like itself. So I conceived the notion of making an automatic machine that would manufacture copies of itself from start to finish. My crab is the model of such a machine.'" "'All the sensations that go to make up your spiritual ego are nothing but electrochemical impulses that travel from receptors up to the brain to be processed, and then down to effectors.'" "'This is where the information is convolved into the model of the object. These thin air-cooled needles are something like those used for intermuscular injections. A thin stream of plastic material is pressed through them in short spurts. The needles are synchronized with the ultra-sound needles which are at this moment feeling around the real object. Drop by drop, from point to point, the thin stream of plastic builds the model. The scale of the model may be regulated by using these levers. They may be made larger or smaller than the real object...' 'What about the colour?' 'That's easy. In the initial state the material is colourless, but the photocalorimeter, according to the colour information received, introduces the necessary amounts of the dyes indicated...'"
 * 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) 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: "Physicist and science fiction writer Anatoly Dneprov has described an experiment in his novella, whose aim was to debunk a thesis about 'infusing with spirituality' a language-to-language translation machine by replacing the machine's elements such as transistors and other switches with people who have been spatially distributed in a particular way. Performing the simple functions of signal transfer, this 'machine' made of people translated a sentence from Portuguese into Russian, while its designer asked all the people who constituted the 'elements' of that machine what this sentence meant. No one knew it, of course, because the language-to-language translation was carried out by the system as a dynamic whole. The designer (in the novella) concluded that 'the machine was not intelligent.'"