Interestingly, Botvinnik never won a world championship match as the world champion. He only ever lost or drew.
An electrical engineer who went to school in (I'm assuming) the 1930s... that would be interesting. Post Maxwell, but pre transistors, and the math they could handle would have been very limited.
I have a lot of respect for people who tackled Newton, and Laplace, and Fourier, and abstract ideas like electrical fields... all of this they had to understand without modern technology. Visualizing such ideas without the help of modern diagrams and videos. It's pretty impressive.
Living back then would have been fun. There were enormous leaps in the understanding of physics, and also pre-chess-engine times meant adjournments and correspondence chess were alive. I think I would have enjoyed it.
Yes, 'electrical' meant literally electrical. Power grids, substations, three phase supplies, that sort of stuff. That being said, it is worth remarking that Botvinnik was very interested in the possibility of chess computers at a time when they were scarcely feasible. Turing and Champernowne wrote the first computer chess program in 1948, the year that Botvinnik became world chess champion. A few years later Botvinnik got interested in them. But he was also interested in the possible application of AI for the benefit of the Soviet economy! Way ahead of the curve (and all practical technology in both cases - even Turing's early program was too complex to run on any computer of the era. And AI has taken a while to meet the hype).
Turing. Alan Turing. Again.
Broke the german code in World War II apparently.
But died young from cyanide poisoning at age 41.
It was apparently never determined whether it was suicide or murder or other.
Reminds me of the death of Alekhine.
"Turing has an extensive legacy with statues and many things named after him, including an annual award for computer science innovations. He appears on the current Bank of England £50 note, which was released on 23 June 2021 to coincide with his birthday. A 2019 BBC series, as voted by the audience, named him the greatest person of the 20th century."
You don't know the difference between logic and heuristics. Botvinnik was neither a scientist nor a logician. He was a chess player (and also an electrical engineer, interestingly)
tygxc perhaps bases his arguments on his chess training.