Georgy Adelson-Velsky

Georgy Maximovich Adelson-Velsky (Russian: Гео́ргий Макси́мович Адельсо́н-Ве́льский; name is sometimes transliterated as Georgii Adelson-Velskii) (8 January 1922 – 26 April 2014) was a Soviet and Israeli mathematician and computer scientist.

Born in Samara, Adelson-Velsky was originally educated as a pure mathematician. His first paper, with his fellow student and eventual long-term collaborator Alexander Kronrod in 1945, won a prize from the Moscow Mathematical Society.[1] He and Kronrod were the last students of Nikolai Luzin, and he earned his doctorate in 1949 under the supervision of Israel Gelfand.[2]

He began working in artificial intelligence and other applied topics in the late 1950s.[1] Along with Evgenii Landis, he invented the AVL tree in 1962. This was the first known balanced binary search tree data structure.[3]

Beginning in 1963, Adelson-Velsky headed the development of a computer chess program at the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics in Moscow. His innovations included the first use of bitboards (a now-common method for representing game positions) in computer chess.[4] The program defeated Kotok-McCarthy in the first chess match between computer programs, also in 1966,[4] and it evolved into Kaissa, the first world computer chess champion.[5]

In August 1992, Adelson-Velsky moved to Israel, and he resided in Ashdod.[1]

Adelson-Velsky died on 26 April 2014, aged 92, in his apartment in Giv'atayim, Israel.[6]

Selected publications
  • Adel'son-Vel'skiĭ, G. M.; Kronrod, A. S. (1945), "On a direct proof of the analyticity of a monogenic function", Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR (N.S.), 50: 7–9, MR 0051912.
  • Adel'son-Vel'skiĭ, G. M.; Landis, E. M. (1962), "An algorithm for organization of information", Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR, 146: 263–266, MR 0156719.
  • Adel'son-Vel'skiĭ, G. M.; Arlazarov, V. L.; Bitman, A. R.; Životovskiĭ, A. A.; Uskov, A. V. (1970), "On programming a computer for playing chess", Akademiya Nauk SSSR I Moskovskoe Matematicheskoe Obshchestvo, 25 (2 (152)): 221–260, MR 0261965. Translated as "Programming a computer to play chess", Russian Mathematical Surveys 25: 221–262, 1970, doi:10.1070/RM1970v025n02ABEH003792
gollark: But that way you can learn better about the problems involved in working it out, the reasons why some thing has to be however it is, sort of thing.
gollark: Somewhat.
gollark: Er, I was joking.
gollark: Obviously the best way to learn a new concept is to independently derive a proof of it?
gollark: Yes, that would be better than the unfathomable wikipedia article maybe?

References
  1. Autobiography (in Russian) – from Ashdod municipal web page.
  2. Georgiy Maksimovich Adelson-Velsky at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. Kent, Allen; Williams, James G. (1993), Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology: Volume 28 - Supplement 13: AerosPate Applications of Artificial Intelligence to Tree Structures, CRC Press, p. 373, ISBN 9780824722814.
  4. Levy, David N. L. (1988), Computer Chess Compendium, Springer-Verlag, pp. 56, 82, ISBN 9780387913315.
  5. Hayes, Jean E.; Levy, David N. L. (1976), The world computer chess championship, Stockholm 1974, University Press, ISBN 9780852242858. On page 50, G. M. Adelson-Velskii is listed as one of Kaissa's authors.
  6. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2016-02-04. Retrieved 2014-06-07.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
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