In May 1997, the world watched as Garry Kasparov, the greatest chess player in the world, was defeated for the first time by the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. It was a watershed moment in the history of technology: machine intelligence had arrived at the point where it could best human intellect. It wasn't a coincidence that Kasparov became the symbol of man's fight against the machines. Chess has long been the fulcrum in development of machine intelligence; the hoax automaton 'The Turk' in the 18th century and Alan Turing's first chess program in 1952 were two early examples of the quest for machines to think like humans - a talent we measured by their ability to beat their creators at chess. As the pre-eminent chess master of the 80s and 90s, it was Kasparov's blessing and his curse to play against each generation's strongest computer champions, contributing to their development and advancing the field. In this breakthrough book, Kasparov tells his side of the story of Deep Blue for the first time - what it was like to strategize against an implacable, untiring opponent. But more than that, he tells his story of AI more generally, and how he's evolved to embrace it, taking part in an urgent debate with philosophers worried about human values, programmers creating self-learning neural networks, and engineers of cutting edge robotics
About the Author
Garry Kasparov is a business speaker, global human rights activist, author and former world chess champion. His keynote lectures and seminars on strategic thinking, achieving peak performance, and tech innovation have been acclaimed in dozens of countries. A frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, he is the author of two books, How Life Imitates Chess and Winter is Coming, each of which has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lives in New York
