“Overtake and Surpass”: Soviet Algorithmic Thinking as a Reinvention of Western Theories during the Cold War

Babintseva, Ekaterina

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-70246-5_2

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 16 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Skinner proposed breaking down learning material into small incremental units, testing students' comprehension of each unit and allowing them to proceed only after they gave the correct answer. 46 Referring to the sequence of units as 'programs', Skinner commissioned their development only to specialists with training in behaviourist psychology and the taught subject. The program was then delivered by a teacher, a special textbook or mechanical teaching machines, which Skinner built in the 1950s.…”

Section: Cybernetics and Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rules of creative thinking: algorithms, heuristics and Soviet cybernetic psychology

Babintseva

2023

BJHS Themes

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the 1960s, creativity became an important category for the Soviet state. Soviet educators and policy makers came to define creativity as problem solving in the service of Soviet automation. At the same time, the introduction of cybernetics, information theory and methods of artificial intelligence (AI) to psychology enabled Soviet researchers to perform quantitative studies of human cognition. The state concern with creative thinking and the cyberneticization of Soviet psychology allowed for the first quantitative studies of human problem solving. These shifts in Soviet society and scientific communities created fertile ground for the creation of Lev Landa's algo-heuristic theory (AHT), a pedagogical method of cultivating rule-bound creativity relying on tools and instruments developed and perfected in information theory and AI research. Drawing on scholarship in the history of algorithmic rationality, the Cold War discourse on creativity as a corporate imperative, and the place of cybernetics-inflected methods in the welfare domain, this article analyses the AHT as rule-based instrument of making creative thinking accessible to the lay mind.

show abstract

Section: Cybernetics and Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%