FIRST EDITION, EXTREMELY RARE.

Korsakov, a statistician at the Russian Ministry of Police in St. Petersburg, was a pioneer in the concept of “mechanical thinking” or artificial intelligence. His “machines for comparing ideas,” described and illustrated in this pamphlet, can “be regarded as the first attempt to design a mechanical device capable of performing such intellectual operations as analyzing , comparing, and selecting data ” (Shilov and Silantiev, p. 71). Certainly, very few copies of this pamphlet were printed, as it is virtually unknown to scholars. Korsakov’s “machines for comparing ideas” predated by nearly two decades the logic machines of Alfred Smee , whose Process of Thought Adapted to Words and Language was published in 1851, but his pioneering contributions to mechanized thinking remained obscure and largely unstudied until recently.

While working in the statistics department of the Ministry of Police, Korsakov became interested in the possibility of using machinery to "improve natural intelligence." To this end, he devised several devices he called "machines for comparing ideas." These included the "linear homeoscope with movable parts," the "linear homeoscope without movable parts," the "flat homeoscope," the "ideoscope," and the "simple comparator." The devices' primary purpose was to facilitate the retrieval of information, stored in the form of punched cards or similar media (e.g., perforated wooden boards). Korsakov announced his new method in September 1832 and, rather than applying for a patent, made the machines available to the public.
The punched card was introduced in 1805, but until then it had been used exclusively in the textile industry to control looms. Korsakov was supposedly the first to use cards for information storage. Sets of punched cards were initially used to operate Jacquard looms for weaving cloth. Korsakov was the first to describe a machine that used them for decision-making. Five years after Korsakov, Charles Babbage introduced the idea of using punched cards to input programs and print mathematical results in the concept of his Analytical Engine, which he first described in 1837 but never built. Much later, in 1884, Herman Hollerith was the first to create electrical punched card tabulators, furthering the use of punched cards in calculations. His Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company was renamed International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924. Finally, during World War II, the U.S. Navy and Harvard built the Harvard Mark 1, a general-purpose electromechanical computer conceptually modeled on Babbage's Analytical Engine. It was 100 times faster than a human calculator. At the same time, the U.S. Army built the ENIAC, the first all-electronic computer. This machine, which used approximately 18,000 vacuum tubes as switches, was 10,000 times faster than a human calculator. These machines, and the computers that followed, processed mathematical information and, until the 1960s and beyond, accepted input and printed output on punched cards.
Although it relies on computer technology, artificial intelligence, unlike traditional digital computers, creates machines capable of performing human-like cognitive tasks, such as learning, problem-solving, and perception. Rather than the explicit programming of traditional computers, AI systems learn from data to improve their responses over time, enabling them to tackle complex problems. Korsakov was the first to invent a machine capable of processing ideas or mechanizing thought, similar to what AI systems do today.
Shilov and Silantiev, Machines à comparer les idées' of Semen Korsakov: First step towards AI , in Tatnall and Leslie, eds., International Communities of Invention and Innovation (Cham: Springer-Verlag, 2016), pp. 71-86).