World Chess Champion
Michael L.J. Apuzzo Lecturer on Creativity and Innovation
Garry Kasparov will speak during the General Scientific Session on Tuesday, October 19. Join him for a meet and greet in the CNS Xperience Lounge immediately following his lecture.
Garry Kasparov became the under-18 chess champion of the USSR at the age of 12 and the world under-20 champion at 17. He came to international fame at the age of 22 as the youngest world chess champion in history in 1985.
Kasparov’s famous matches against the IBM super-computer Deep Blue in 1996-97 were key to bringing artificial intelligence, and chess, into the mainstream. They also sparked Kasparov’s passionate interest in the human relationship with our increasingly intelligent machines, a theme he has investigated for decades beginning with the invention of “Advanced Chess” in 1998.
In 1990, he and his family escaped ethnic violence in his native Baku as the USSR collapsed. In 2005, Kasparov, in his 20th year as the world’s top-rated player, retired from professional chess to join the vanguard of the Russian pro-democracy movement. In 2012, Kasparov was named chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation (HRF). HRF promotes individual liberty worldwide and organizes the annual Oslo Freedom Forum. Facing imminent arrest during Putin’s crackdown, Kasparov moved from Moscow to New York City in 2013.
Since 1990, Kasparov has been a regular contributor on politics to many major publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Daily News. Kasparov speaks frequently to business audiences around the world on strategy, decision-making, and artificial intelligence.
Kasparov’s book “ How Life Imitates Chess” on strategy and decision-making is available in over 20 languages. He is the author of two acclaimed series of chess books, “My Great Predecessors” and “Modern Chess.” Kasparov’s prescient 2015 book, “ Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped,” is a blend of history, memoir, and analysis of the threats to the modern world order.
Kasparov’s latest book is “ Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins” (2017). It reveals the full story of his matches against Deep Blue and his optimistic and pragmatic analysis of our future with intelligent machines.