Georgy Adelson-Velsky

Georgy adelson-velsky
Georgy Adelson-Velsky, c. 1980
Born
Georgy Maximovich Adelson-Velsky

(1922-03-03)3 March 1922
Died(2014-04-26)26 April 2014
NationalityRussian, Israeli

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 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]

He worked as a professor in the department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Bar Ilan University.

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

  1. ^ a b c 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. ^ a b 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. ^ "RIP: Георгий Максимович Адельсон-Вельский - Misha Furman". Archived from the original on 4 February 2016. Retrieved 7 June 2014.