LEONARD RASTRIGIN graduated in aircraft design from the Moscow Aeronautical Institute and, in 1960, presented his Ph.D. thesis on mechanics. He then made a 179-degree turn and ‘retreated’ into cybernetics, where he studied random search a new technique for finding optimum solutions to complex problems. Cybernetics brings him both joy and sorrow. His work in this field has gained him his doctorate and a professorship, and he is now Director of the only random search laboratory in the world. Here his task is to vindicate the claims of random search and to demonstrate its advantages in practical applications.