Chess · AI · Democracy
Garry Kasparov
b. 1963 · Baku, USSR
Beat the champion, lost to the machine, then teamed up with it.
With roughly 35 legal moves in a typical position, the number of lines grows as 35 to the power of the depth. Deep Blue searched around 200 million positions a second. A grandmaster looks at a handful of candidate moves (the gold path) and goes deep on those.
01
Youngest champion
He trained in Mikhail Botvinnik's school as a boy. In 1985, aged 22, he beat Anatoly Karpov to become the youngest undisputed world champion, and he kept the classical title until Vladimir Kramnik beat him in 2000.
His peak rating of 2851 in 1999 stood as the record for well over a decade.
02
Deep Blue
In 1996 he beat IBM's Deep Blue 4–2. In the 1997 rematch in New York he lost 3½–2½, the first time a reigning world champion lost a match to a computer under standard time controls.
Deep Blue won by brute force: about 200 million positions a second. He won his games by judgement, pruning the tree to the few moves worth examining.
03
Human plus machine
In 1998 he launched Advanced Chess, where each player has a computer partner. Teams of humans and machines working together could beat either one alone. His 2017 book Deep Thinking argues for that partnership with AI.
04
Opposition
He retired from professional chess in 2005 to oppose Vladimir Putin, was detained at protests in Moscow, and now campaigns for democracy from abroad. He chairs the Human Rights Foundation.
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How they thought
Prune the tree
Pick a few candidate moves by judgement and calculate those deeply instead of everything shallowly.
Prepare harder than anyone
His opening preparation was famously deep; he arrived with ideas his opponents had never seen.
Process beats raw power
A weaker player with a better way of working with a machine can beat a stronger one.
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Timeline
1963
Born in Baku.
1985
World champion at 22, beating Karpov.
1996
Beats Deep Blue 4–2.
1997
Loses the rematch to Deep Blue 3½–2½.
1998
Starts Advanced Chess: human plus computer teams.
2000
Loses the classical title to Kramnik.
2005
Retires to oppose Putin.
2017
Publishes Deep Thinking.
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In their own words
“Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.”
I
Train your brain
Mastered 0 / 6
How old was Kasparov when he became world champion?
II
Train the machine
166 lines to learn, 38 held back. Names are removed. Random batches, dropout and noise make each seed take its own path.