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Garry Kasparov

Garry Kasparov was the thirteenth world chess champion. Also a former Russian politician, a writer, and a political activist, he is the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation and the founder of the Renew Democracy Initiative. He is the author of Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped (2015) and Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins (2017). (January 2020)

Follow Garry Kasparov on Twitter: @Kasparov63.

IN THE REVIEW

The Bobby Fischer Defense

Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer after Spassky won the first game of the 1972 World Chess Championship, held in Reykjavík, Iceland. Fischer went on to win the championship.

Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall—from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness

by Frank Brady
Even in his prime there were concerns about Fischer’s stability, during a lifetime of outbursts and provocations. Then there were the tales from his two decades away from the board, rumors that made their way around the chess world. That he was impoverished, that he had become a religious fanatic, that he was handing out anti-Semitic literature in the streets of Los Angeles. It all seemed too fantastic, too much in line with all the stories of chess driving people mad—or mad people playing chess—that have found such a good home in literature.

The Chess Master and the Computer

Garry Kasparov during his rematch against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue, 1997

Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind

by Diego Rasskin-Gutman, translated from the Spanish by Deborah Klosky
In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. The four leading chess computer manufacturers had sent …

NYR DAILY

A Popular Front to Stop Trump

Matryoshka dolls featuring Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump, Moscow, Russia, December 3, 2019

After three years of his increasingly disgraceful behavior, Trump’s critics still seem to believe there are lines he will not cross in order to protect himself and his power. This is a common mistake, and a natural one. A disregard for anything but oneself is a type of evil superpower in politics (and business). It allows such people to constantly surprise their rivals by doing what others find unthinkable. Every time I hear someone say, “But Trump would never do x,” I recall all the times we were told by tut-tutting Western pundits that surely Putin would never jail his opposition, would never return to the presidency, would never invade Ukraine, etc. He would and he did.