Garry Kasparov: Chess, Deep Blue, AI, and Putin

Lex Fridman introduces Garry Kasparov, considered by many to be the greatest chess player of all time. Kasparov dominated chess from 1986 until his retirement in 2005, ranking world number one for most of those 19 years. In the long arc of history he may be remembered for his match against IBM's Deep Blue, whose initial victories against the machine and eventual loss captured the world's imagination about the role of AI in civilization's future. Fridman says that excitement inspired a generation of AI researchers, including himself.

Kasparov is also a pro-democracy political thinker and leader and a human rights activist. His books include How Life Imitates Chess, on strategy and decision making; Winter Is Coming, on his opposition to the Putin regime; and Deep Thinking, on the roles of artificial and human intelligence in defining the future.

Asked whether he was driven more by the love of winning or the hatred of losing, Kasparov says he had not heard the question before. Losing was always painful, almost like physical pain, because he knew a loss came from his own mistake. He believed the result had to be decided by the quality of his play, which may sound arrogant but helped him move forward because there was always room for improvement.

Fridman asks about the fear of mistakes. Kasparov says fear of mistakes guarantees mistakes. The difference among the very top players is the ability to make a decision without predictable consequences, like standing at a crossroads with uncertain outcomes. At that level, he says, play depends on inner strength: making the decision, standing firm and being confident of going through.

He says the answer is neither love of winning nor hatred of losing: the driving force was always his passion for making a difference and creating something new, such as new ideas in the opening or an original plan in the middlegame. That helped him move from chess, where he was on top, to another life in which he knew he would not necessarily be number one but could still be productive by influencing people, such as joining the democratic movement in Russia or talking about human-machine relations.

Fridman asks if Kasparov was haunted by demons or fears, since his account sounds almost religious. Kasparov returns to the crucial moments of his career. From the early days, he believed he could make all the difference by playing well or making mistakes. No matter how strong his opponent, whether an ordinary player or a world champion like Anatoly Karpov, he believed it was up to him. He knew he was not invincible and made blunders, more of them with age.

He cites his latest chess experience, a game against Fabiano Caruana, then one of the top three players, in Fischer random chess (960). He lost very badly because of mistakes despite having many winning positions, and says that 15 years earlier he would have crushed him. He says he was not very upset: he can fight any opponent but not his biological clock. At 56, he felt he could still play a great game, though he lacked the energy and concentration to finish it, and he took pleasure in completely outplaying one of the world's top players for much of it.