American chess genius Bobby Fischer defeated the reigning world champion Russia's Boris Spassky in 1972 in what has been called "the most exciting world chess championship ever". The gold mine of Soviet AIOne of the leading figures in Soviet AI to go down in history was Alexander Kronrod, a mathematician who was, among other things, in charge of the team that developed the Kaissa chess programme. “With clever methods, small data can move mountains – or in this case, reveal them,” Valery Manokhin, a machine learning specialist, wrote in a blog post on Medium on the Soviet gold rush. When Russian AI inspired AppleSome of Silicon Valley’s big names also have Soviet AI to thank. The practical applications of Soviet research often remained “marginal", Kirtchik said, "since the computers at their disposal were often incapable of performing the necessary calculations”.