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Garry Kasparov

Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the United Civil Front, a Russian pro-democracy group opposing the administration of Vladimir Putin. In 1985 he became the youngest player ever to win the World Chess Championship and remained the top-ranked chess player in the world for twenty years until retiring from professional chess in 2005. (March 2011)

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 …