Legacy!

[Use memory fragment? Upon use, you will enter an immersive recollection. Your consciousness will temporarily leave reality during this time. Please ensure your surroundings are safe.]

Qi Hao glanced around. There was hardly anyone left in the reading room.

He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

"Confirm."

[Loading memory fragment...]

The scene before his eyes receded like the tide.

In its place was a dimly lit laboratory.

Concrete walls, sheet-metal heating pipes, and several enormous computers took up most of the room. The countless indicator lights on the machines flickered on and off.

A middle-aged man in a gray sweater stood before a blackboard, holding a stub of chalk.

He was short, with graying hair. The blackboard was covered in mathematical formulas that seemed both familiar and unfamiliar to Qi Hao: matrix operations, probability derivations, and some systems of notation he had never seen before.

This had to be Konrod.

"Mr. Konrod, the system has completed its final round of debugging," a young man with glasses said in Russian. Strangely, although Qi Hao didn't know a single word of Russian, he could understand the conversation perfectly inside the memory fragment, as if it came with simultaneous interpretation.

"The United States' program is ready too. The match starts this afternoon."

Konrod didn't turn around. He wrote another line of formulas on the blackboard, then tossed the chalk onto the table.

"Our algorithm is inferior to theirs in search depth, but our pruning strategy is more precise. Mathematics is our strong suit. We have a chance of winning."

As soon as he finished speaking, Qi Hao saw the scene shift.

It was the same laboratory, but now the room was packed with people. Some wore military uniforms, some wore white lab coats, and several were dressed in suits and polished shoes, probably officials sent by their superiors to observe.

In the center of the room, two computers faced each other, each connected to a teleprinter. There was no physical chessboard; every move was printed out as code on the teleprinters.

The casing of the machine on one side bore the project's code name in Russian, while the other had a nameplate from the American McCarthy Laboratory.

This was a computer chess match.

Qi Hao's heart leaped into his throat.

Although he was present in this memory as a third-person observer, the tension felt as real as if he were playing himself.

The match began.

The Soviet Union's program played white and made a perfectly conventional opening move: d4.

The United States' program responded with e6.

The first ten moves passed without incident, both sides developing their positions by the book.

But from the eleventh move onward, the position grew complicated.

The United States' program's rook and bishop worked together seamlessly, with almost no pause between moves. Its calculation speed was frightening.

The atmosphere in the laboratory grew visibly tense.

A man who looked like a military officer asked a colleague beside him in a low voice, "Can our machine hold up?"

No one answered.

Konrod stood in a corner with his arms folded, his face expressionless.

But Qi Hao noticed that his eyes were fixed on every line of moves the teleprinter spat out, and his mouth never stopped moving.

"Cyka blyat, McCarthy thinks he can beat me?"

"Those Americans are so naive!"

Qi Hao ignored Konrod's swearing, privately astonished by his confidence.

As things stood, the United States' program seemed to have the upper hand!

On the eighteenth move, the Soviet Union's program suddenly made an inexplicable move.

Its knight jumped to an exceptionally tricky position, threatening both the opposing queen and an undefended pawn. Worse still, it cut off the United States' program's rook's escape route.

The moves that followed seemed to go mad.

The Soviet Union's program made four consecutive moves, tearing a gap in its opponent's defenses.

Wait, that's impossible.

Qi Hao stared in disbelief as the United States' program grew slower and slower.

The thirty-first move.

The teleprinter spat out its final line of characters.

Checkmate.

Cheers erupted in the laboratory.

After four games in a row, the Soviet Union's program ultimately won 3:1.

Qi Hao was clearly only an observing fragment of a soul, yet the surge of heat in his chest felt as real as if he had made the final move himself.

Qi Hao opened his eyes.

The bright incandescent lights of the modern library pierced his eyes. Familiar bookshelves surrounded him, and the occasional sound of pages turning reached his ears.

"That was insane..."

Qi Hao's heart was still pounding in his chest.

He pulled out his phone, opened his browser, and typed a few keywords into the search bar: Soviet Union computer chess match.

When the results appeared, he clicked on the first encyclopedia entry.

"KAISSA means the mother of chess. It was a chess program developed by the Institute of Control Sciences of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In a match against the American McCarthy team, it won with three victories and one draw in four games."

He looked through several more papers and popular science articles, growing more astonished the more he read.

The Soviet Union had not been a blank slate in artificial intelligence. Quite the opposite: Soviet mathematicians had done a great deal of pioneering work in several specialized fields, including game theory, automated theorem proving, and pattern recognition.

It was just that most of these achievements had been published in Russian-language journals. Combined with the break in Academic Legacy after the Soviet Union's collapse and the Western narrative's deliberate neglect of this history, that meant almost no one knew about it now.

The memory fragment hadn't lied to him.

Back then, McCarthy's American team had the world's most advanced IBM mainframes. Their computing power utterly crushed the Soviets' in a one-sided rout, and everyone believed the Soviets would be beaten so badly they wouldn't know what hit them.

But what happened?

The Soviet Union's program, with three wins and one draw, ground the arrogant United States' AI program into the dirt!

How?

With the help of those freakishly capable Soviet Union mathematicians!

Despite their lack of computing power, Konrod's team had used an extraordinarily ingenious mathematical model to develop the most advanced algorithm of its time.

In other words, hardware determined the floor, but mathematics determined the ceiling!

With those freakish mathematicians backing it, Soviet Union AI technology hadn't been nearly that weak!

He took a closer look and discovered that Konrod was a true god of Soviet Union mathematics!

The old man was a hardcore mathematician through and through. In his youth, he had not only carried a gun amid the hail of bullets in World War II and suffered serious injuries, but after leaving the military, he had plunged straight into the depths of pure and computational mathematics. He had also invented the Gauss–Konrod Quadrature Formula in the field of numerical analysis.

And in the field of artificial intelligence, the old man's vision had been even sharper.

At the time, he led a mathematics team at the Soviet Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics. When the whole world thought computers could only be used to calculate nuclear ballistic trajectories and meteorological data, it was he who made that famous pronouncement, revered as a guiding principle in the history of computer science...

"Chess is the fruit fly of artificial intelligence!"

What he meant was that, just as breakthroughs in biological genetics began with the study of fruit flies, humanity's breakthrough toward true artificial intelligence had to be chess, which required deep searches through an extremely complex game tree!

Qi Hao's gaze returned to the paper in the system panel, "Absolute Pruning Inequalities and the Asymptotic Convergence Theorem for Finite-State Game Trees."

He had thought the reward was a joke before, but now it had suddenly gained considerable weight.

It was a high-quality paper that had never been published.

If I can fully grasp the logic in it, won't I be able to learn its approaches and methods?

Qi Hao was absorbed in thought when a new notification popped up on the system panel.

[Detected that you have obtained the original manuscript of Kolorod's paper. Chain quest triggered.]

[New quest: Academic Legacy]

[Quest objective: Publish an academic paper in mathematics or an interdisciplinary field in an SCI-indexed journal as the first author. The paper must cite at least three academic works from the Soviet Union era.]

[Quest deadline: 90 days.]

[Quest rewards: 1. Subject experience points (exact amount determined by completion quality) 2. Random treasure chest ×1 3. 300 points]

[The flame of red science should not be extinguished in the dust of an archive. Go, let the world hear those forgotten voices again!]

Qi Hao stared at the quest, somewhat dumbfounded.

He was a first-year undergraduate, and he had to publish in an SCI journal and cite Soviet Union papers?