Garry Kasparov: Chess, Deep Blue, AI, and Putin | Lex Fridman Podcast #46

The following is a conversation with Garry Kasparov. He's considered by many to be the greatest chess player of all time. From 1986, until his retirement in 2005, he dominated the chess world, ranking world number one for most of those 19 years. While he has many historical matches against human chess players, in the long arc of history, he may be remembered for his match against a machine, IBM's Deep Blue. His initial victories and eventual loss to Deep Blue captivated the imagination of the world of what role artificial intelligence systems may play in our civilization's future. That excitement inspired an entire generation of AI researchers, including myself, to get into the field. Garry is also a pro-democracy political thinker and leader, a fearless human rights activist, and author of several books, including How Life Imitates Chess, which is a book on strategy and decision-making, Winter Is Coming, which is a book articulating his opposition to the Putin regime, and Deep Thinking, which is a book on the role of both artificial intelligence and human intelligence in defining our future. This is the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on iTunes, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter @lexfridman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. And now, here's my conversation with Garry Kasparov. As perhaps the greatest chess player of all time, when you look introspectively at your psychology throughout your career, what was the bigger motivator, the love of winning or the hatred of losing?

Tough question. I have to confess, I never heard it before, which is ... again, congratulations. It's quite an accomplishment. (laughs)

(laughs)

Um, losing was always painful. For me, it was almost like a physical pain, because I knew that if I lost a game it's just because I made a mistake. So it ... I always believed that the r- the result of the game, uh, had to be decided by the quality of my play. Okay, you may say it s- sounds arrogant, but it helped me to move forward because I always knew that there was room for improvement, so it's the ...

Was there the fear of the mistake?

Actually, fear of mistake guarantees mistakes. And the difference between, uh, top players, the very top, is that it's the ability to make a decision-

Yeah.

... without predictable consequences. You don't know what's happening. It starts intuitively. I could go this way or that way and, uh, there are always hesitations. You know, people are like, "You're, you are just, you know, at a crossroad. You can go right, you can go left, you can go straight. You can turn and go back, and the consequences are just un- uh, very uncertain." Just, you have certain ideas what happens on the right or on the left or on the just, you know, if you go straight, but it's not enough to make well-calculated choice, and, uh, when you play chess at the very top, it's, it's, it's, it's about your inner strength. So I can make this decision, I will stand firm, and I'm not going to waste my time because I have full confidence that I will go through. Um, going back to your original question is I would say neither. It's just it's the, it's lo- love for winning, hate for losing, they were important elements, psychological elements, but the key element, it's the, I would say the, the driving force was always my passion for, for making a di- making a difference. It's just I can move forward and I can always, it's, I can always enjoy not just playing but creating something new.