A Russian Indiana Jones

It is no secret that the democracy of a certain country hardly ever reflects the support given to science by its authorities. It has often been the case that totalitarian countries were more generous towards science than their democratic neighbors. Of course, this observation may only be considered true as long as scientists do not interfere with government politics, and only if their achievements contribute to boosting the country’s reputation. If a scientist succeeds in obtaining the image of a "national hero", any government, especially a totalitarian one, will love him.

A young visionary
When Russia was immersed in revolutionary turmoil during both World Wars, Russian genetics and agricultural science were among the most advanced in the world. The greater part of the success of Russian life sciences in the first half of the 20th century may be attributed to a young, talented, and hardworking agronomist as well as an outstanding organizer, Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov. Nikolai was born in Moscow in 1887 as the oldest of four children in a wealthy family of merchants. His younger brother Sergey became a renowned physicist and the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Nikolai himself was interested in science - plants in particular - ever since he was a young boy. He graduated at the Moscow Agricultural Institute in 1911 and began his scientific career in the field of applied botany or cultivated plants. The crucial moment in his scientific development came in 1913 when his superiors decided to send him to England to further his knowledge in genetics. William Bateson, for whom Nikolai worked for a while, was at the time the world’s foremost geneticist and had a great influence on the young scientist. He returned to Russia shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, swiftly finished his post-graduate studies and became a professor of agronomy, botany and genetics at the Saratov University.
Soon after the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lenin appointed him chairman of the Institute of Applied Botany and New Crops in Leningrad which, under his leadership, quickly became the world’s foremost institution in the field of cultivated plants research. At the peak of his career around 1934, Nikolai employed 20.000 assistants from all across the Soviet Union. Surprisingly, neither Nikolai nor his younger brother Sergey ever joined the Communist Party. They did, however, support the social and economic goals of the revolutionary regime.

The largest gene bank for plants
Nikolai Vavilov was incredibly energetic and hardworking. According to accounts given by his colleagues, he slept only a couple of hours a day, requiring his technicians to be on the field at four o’clock in the morning, ready to start work. As he understood the basics of genetics, which he acquired during his studies in Europe, he knew that crossbreeding would enable him to create better and more disease resistant plants, as long as he had enough different sorts or species of plants at his disposal.
The idea was simple: in order to grow the best plants for producing food he needed to obtain a larger assortment of plant species and variations that he could crossbreed and discover those which were the most appropriate for cultivation. The more different varieties of wheat, rice and potato from different parts of the world he had, the easier it was to grow new disease resistant sorts.
Of course, he did not have a collection of different varieties of plant seeds at that particular time, so he took advantage of his position at the Institute of Applied Botanics and organized more than one hundred scientific expeditions to Asia, Africa, America and the Middle East, gathering samples of more than ten thousand plant species. Vavilov traveled to distant mountains, forests and meadows, sending rare sorts of food plants, such as rice, wheat, corn, barley, oats and potato back to his institute in Leningrad. Naturally, he was also very interested in then less known crop plants like lentils, chickpeas, soybeans and several others. He created the largest seed bank in the world that contained a couple hundred thousand samples, thirty thousand of which alone were sorts of wheat. Some of the plants he discovered were still unknown in Europe at that time.

Plant hunting
Sometimes, Vavilov could acquire his plant seeds from markets in remote places, at other times, however, he encountered more difficulties. One such occasion was when he barely managed to return alive from one of his African expeditions to today’s Ethiopia in the 1920s. In his writings he describes how he had to paddle his way among threatening giant crocodiles of the Blue Nile, searching for a rare sort of wheat and barley. When he was later spending his night in a tent on the river bank he was attacked by a swarm of spiders and scorpions which he succeeded in tricking back outside: he lit an oil lamp in front of the tent and its light quickly lured the dangerous creatures back out. Even deeper in the African wilderness he was taken prisoner by armed bandits who he later disabled by employing a good old Russian method: he got them drunk on some fine vodka and escaped when they fell into an inebriated sleep.
In 1923 he built more than one hundred experiment stations for testing crop plants. A few years later, he united all of his research centers under the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences and became its president. During the same year he was elected a life member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
In 1926 he published his famous treatise on the geographical origin of cultivated plants. He argued that every existing "domesticated" plant has its particular place of origin somewhere on the planet where it is also possible to find the greatest genetic diversity of this individual species. If, for example, we were searching for new sorts of potato, we would do best to look for them in South America because potato originates in the area of today’s Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.

The quarrel with Stalin’s protégé Lisenko
When Nikolai was in charge of the Institute, Russian plant geneticists were among the best in the word. He openly supported international cooperation and the transmission of new knowledge from the West which was of great benefit to Russian science, but did not comply with the regime ideology. When Stalin’s agricultural reform with kolkhoz farms (Soviet collective farms) did not really work out that well, the regime needed a scapegoat. Nikolai Ivanovic Vavilov was a suitable victim as he had already been exposed to criticism on account of his expensive and frequent journeys to far corners of the earth. Vavilov tried to defend himself, but his arguments did not do him any good.

The greater part of the most important positions in the field of Soviet biological and agricultural research were appointed to the charismatic, yet poorly educated agronomist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko who caught the government’s attention with his alternative approach to biology. He argued for a sort of Lamarckism. In his opinion, Vavilov’s method of searching for new species of plants by crossbreeding was, academically speaking, excessively abstract and bourgeois. He suggested a far simpler and, according to him, more effective method of "training" plants to "teach" them how to adapt the necessary form and structure that would enable them to produce the maximum possible amount of food.
Lysenko personified the mythical ideal of the Soviet country boy genius, who filled the pages with heroic achievements of "genuine home-made" science. When he was awarded the Order of Lenin, the Pravda newspaper published a letter of thanks from his parents, addressed to Stalin himself.

The day we found out that our Trofim was awarded the Order of Lenin was the happiest day of our lives. How could we have ever even dreamed of such a great honor bestowed on us, poor farmers from the Karlovka village?

Lysenko’s "agricultural miracles" did not, however, work in practice. The greatest damage he brought upon his country’s economy due to his lack of knowledge was when he nearly destroyed the Soviet dairy industry. By crossbreeding pedigree cows with common bulls he managed to ruin the achievements of several generations of elaborate cattle breeding.

Starvation in a warehouse of food
Moments away from the Second World War, Stalin’s purges finally caught up with Nikolai. On August 4^th, 1940 he was arrested during his trip to Ukraine and charged with sabotage and collaboration with bourgeois reactionary forces. At first, he was sentenced to death, but the punishment was later reduced to ten years of imprisonment after his brother Sergey intervened. When he became a member of the distinguished British Royal Society in 1942, the Russian secret police reopened his case, but they were too late. Even though Vavilov dedicated his life to studying food plants, he starved to death in his cell on January 16^th, 1943.
There is an anecdote from times when Leningrad was under siege during the Second World War which attests to Vavilov’s personal charisma and influence. When people were dying of hunger on the streets of the city, a few of his colleagues selflessly guarded the Institute with its priceless collection of seeds which they had gathered with great effort from remote parts of the world. At least ten of his colleagues succumbed to starvation, without even touching the valuable samples of potato, rice, corn and other crops from faraway places.

How can I tell you're not a robot?

In the virtual world of the Internet, identities often get blurred. Senior citizens easily pass themselves for teenagers, and timid geeks, normally hiding behind their glasses, can take on the roles of seductive young women. If you are not careful enough when chatting with strangers, you might soon find out that the charming young woman you have shared so many good talks with is, in fact, none other than your annoying neighbor.
The development of the Internet quickly revealed another problem concerning identification, one that can almost be considered a philosophical issue. Not only can people virtually take on other identities on the Web than they possess in real life, computers themselves can impersonate people. Today, this most certainly is not a thing of science fiction as these identity swaps occur on a regular basis. Robots or, to be precise, programs portraying other people online, sign in to all kinds of Web forums where they post advertisements for their masters or creators. The smarter ones even know how to create their own free e-mail accounts which they use to flood other accounts with advertisements every day.

Exterminator wanted
Robots roaming the Internet and portraying other people have become a serious problem around 2000. Administrators of larger websites realized they needed to invent an effective method of distinguishing real people from robots as soon as possible. The task seems simple enough at first, but it proves to be a pretty tough nut to crack as soon as you take it on. Should websites employ people who would exchange a few words with every single visitor who wants to sign in? This would certainly prove to be a waste of time and money. A more effective solution was needed.
The job description of a person detecting robots who surf the Web creating problems for website owners would not be anything like that of the legendary Blade Runner where officer Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) chases runaway replicants or robots who look and act just like people. However, this comparison is not completely out of place. The movie implies that officer Deckard himself is a replicant. The development of programs that can differentiate between robots and human beings on the Internet was closely followed by searching for a method of exterminating these troublesome artificial creatures that wreak havoc on the Web.

The Turing test
Soon after the Second World War, Alan Turing, an English mathematician who contributed his share to constructing the first computers, contemplated the possibility of computer thought. He quickly found out this was a much too abstract question, so he tried to transform it into something more tangible and simple. He started to develop a practical method of differentiating between artificial and human intelligence. How to determine whether a machine is capable of thinking? One of the most obvious solutions is talking to this machine. If it is impossible to tell the difference between its responses and those given by a human being, then there simply is no more difference between artificial and human intelligence. The Turing test, as it was later named, is, simply put, a method of determining whether someone is a man or a machine. Both can be posed questions to which they have to answer. At the same time, we have no notion about who is in which room. If after a longer interview we are unable to determine which room conceals the living person, the other entity has successfully passed the test and, according to the Turing criterion, cannot be set apart from a real human being. The Turing test is thus a way to determine, by exchanging a series of questions and answers with two subjects via our keyboard, if we are conversing with a man or a machine. The machine passes the test when the assessor cannot tell whether he is talking to a man or a machine.

What robots can’t do?
Disturbing attacks by malicious robots have forced the administrators of larger websites to seek help from experts, specialized in artificial intelligence. They quickly concluded that the best solution for "exterminating" such robots would be a series of brief tasks that real people would find easy to solve in a matter of moments, while computers or robots would need more time to succeed, if they could at all. Computers are much faster in solving simple calculations than humans, so mathematical tasks were not an option.
It soon became clear that the tasks should involve problems which pose the greatest difficulties to artificial intelligence researchers. One of these was the visual recognition of images and symbols. This is where people have, during millions of years of evolution, developed extremely efficient means of recognizing images and symbols even when they are distorted.
Modern computers are becoming quite good at recognizing an image of a text. They can determine which letter is portrayed just by scanning the form presented by the image. This is how they are able to convert the copy of a printed text back into a file which can then be edited and changed anew. However, such recognition can only be successful if the image of the text is sufficiently clear and legible. If the letters are smudged, these programs usually turn out to be helpless. They can only see an indistinct blotch and not the text, while people can still read damaged or smudged writing.

The Automated Turing test
This is how engineers came up with the idea to create a robot, capable of differentiating between artificial and human intelligence. While people have no difficulties reading smudged letters and numbers, that is something artificial intelligence of today can’t cope with yet. The researchers of the Carnegie Melon University have developed an automated Turing test that needs no human guidance. They named it CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.
In simpler terms, CAPTCHA is a program that can compose and evaluate a test that it could not actually solve by itself. It is a program for exterminating programs. It gives us a simple visual task that usually requires us to copy a series of smudged letters and numbers, shown on the screen. According to our answer, the program can tell whether we are real humans or mere robots.
Every Internet user has probably encountered such a program at some point. We have to pass its test in order to register to an Internet forum, to create a new e-mail account or to file our income tax return. Of course, as years go by, artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly advanced and programs for exterminating programs have to be improved all the time.

Which is the best school for computer science?
There is an entertaining anecdote about how robots can participate in an Internet survey from times when programs for exterminating programs did not yet exist. In November 1999, the website slashdot.com started a poll to find out which was the best school for studying computer science which is quite a delicate question, especially when posted on the Internet.
To make voting as fair as possible, each computer was given one vote. The program that registered the votes also registered Internet addresses (IP addresses) of individual computers that had already cast their vote, allowing each individual to vote only once. However, students from the Carnegie Mellon University found a way to bypass this protection and designed a program which cast thousands of votes for their university. By the next day, MIT students wrote their own voting program which gathered votes for their side. This is how the battle for votes between the two robots/computer programs began. In the end, MIT snatched its victory by 21.156 votes, Carnegie Mellon followed with 21.032 votes, and other schools finished with less than 1000 votes each.
When it comes to deciding on the best school for computer science it might be completely appropriate to grant computers an equal right to vote. In the case of other surveys, however, one would probably be much more comfortable knowing that each registered vote represents a human being.