Anatoly Dneprov (writer)

Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem summarizes Dneprov's argument in his book Summa Technologiae (1964) as follows:

Dneprov's short story The Game (1961) presents a scenario, the Portuguese stadium, anticipating the later China brain and Chinese room thought experiments. It concerns a stadium of people who act as switches and memory cells implementing a program to translate a sentence of Portuguese, a language that none of them knows. The plot of the story goes as follows: All 1400 delegates of the Soviet Congress of Young Mathematicians willingly agree to take part in a "purely mathematical game" proposed by Professor Zarubin. The game requires the execution of a certain set of rules given to the participants, who communicate with each other using sentences composed only of the words "zero" and "one". After several hours of playing the game, the participants have no idea of what is going on as they get progressively tired. One girl becomes too dizzy and leaves the game just before it ends. On the next day, Professor Zarubin reveals to everyone's excitement that the participants were simulating an existing 1961 Soviet computing machine named "Ural" that translated a sentence written in Portuguese "Os maiores resultados são produzidos por – pequenos mas contínuos esforços," a language that nobody from the participants understood, into the sentence in Russian "The greatest goals are achieved through minor but continuous ekkedt", a language that everyone from the participants understood. It becomes clear that the last word, which should have been "efforts", is mistranslated due to the dizzy girl leaving the simulation.

Anatoly Dneprov (also spelled Anatoly Dnieprov, Ukrainian: Анатолій Дніпров, pseudonym; real name Anatoliy Petrovych Mitskevitch) was a Soviet physicist, cyberneticist and writer of Ukrainian ancestry. His science fiction stories were published in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the United States from 1958 to 1970. He is known best for his stories Crabs on the Island, The Maxwell Equations and The Purple Mummy.