Garry Kasparov

Campaigner & Chess Grandmaster

After defeating arch-rival Karpov, Garry Kasparov remained the highest-rated grandmaster for most of the next two decades, and he remains one of the game's best known names. His matches against IBM's pioneering computer Deep Blue were a milestone in artificial intelligence, and he has continues to examine the rise of machine learning and AI. He also considers how chess contains useful parallels to business - in terms of strategy, decision-making, maximising resources and beating the competition. He has also dedicated much of his energy to politics,and is an outspoken critic of modern Russia.

Speaking Topics

Artificial Intelligence / AI
Geopolitics, Policy & Politics
High Performance
Resilience
Risk & Risk Management
Strategy

Biography

A child prodigy, Garry Kasparov qualified as an international chess grandmaster at sixteen. He was World Champion for fourteen years, during which his attacking style and faultless strategy proved invincible. Famously, he pitted his talents against IBM’s pioneering supercomputer, Deep Blue, which could analyse 50 billion moves in three minutes. The series still stands at one match each, remains a pivotal moment in the development of AI, and inspired Garry’s book Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins, an examination of artificial intelligence and machine learning and the nature of human-machine competition and collaboration.

Aside from a look at the differences between human and machine thinking, Garry’s presentations highlight themes that are as pivotal in the corporate world as they are in chess. He shows how the most complex challenge in either arena can be distilled down into strategy, decision-making, use of resources and the desire to beat the competition. He considers the nature of peak performance, and how intuitive decision-making is a key component to success, if understood and applied correctly, a facet machines are yet to master.

Although still participating in exhibition matches, Garry now also devotes much of his time to politics and campaigning and is a leading pro-democracy voice and human rights advocate. Years after his rivalry with Karpov was seen as a show of opposition to the authoritarian Soviet state, he has become a vocal opponent of the Putin regime and its policies at home and abroad and is the author of Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped, a combination of history, analysis and biography. Garry has been a contributing editor to The Wall Street Journal for over three decades, and comments on politics across the media. He also is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Oxford-Martin School looking at human-machine collaboration, is a member of the executive advisory board of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, and a Security Ambassador for Avast Software.

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