Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik, Ph.D.

Ph.D.

A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

  ( – May 5, 1995) was a Soviet and Russian

Russians

The Russian people are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, speaking the Russian language and primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries....

 International Grandmaster

International Grandmaster

The title Grandmaster is awarded to strong chess players by the world chess organization FIDE. Apart from World Champion, Grandmaster is the highest title a chess player can attain....

 and three-time World Chess Champion

World Chess Championship

The World Chess Championship is played to determine the World Champion in the board game chess. Men and women of any age are eligible to contest this title....

. Working as an electrical engineer

Electrical engineering

Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...

 and computer scientist

Computer scientist

A computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....

 at the same time, he was one of the very few famous chess players who achieved distinction in another career while playing top-class competitive chess. He also developed a chess-playing algorithm that tried to "think" like a top human player, but this approach has been superseded by a brute-force search

Brute-force search

In computer science, brute-force search or exhaustive search, also known as generate and test, is a trivial but very general problem-solving technique that consists of systematically enumerating all possible candidates for the solution and checking whether each candidate satisfies the problem's...

 strategy that exploits the rapid increase in the calculation speed of modern computers.

Botvinnik was the first world-class player to develop within the Soviet Union (Alekhine

Alexander Alekhine

Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine was the fourth World Chess Champion. He is often considered one of the greatest chess players ever.By the age of twenty-two, he was already among the strongest chess players in the world. During the 1920s, he won most of the tournaments in which he played...

 was a top player before the Russian Revolution), putting him under political pressure but also giving him considerable influence within Soviet chess.