PERSON
Garry Kasparov
The chess grandmaster who lost to a machine in 1997, then spent the rest of his life proving that loss was an invitation to collaboration rather than a verdict on human obsolescence—the inventor of centaur chess and the cycle’s most grounded optimist about what humans and machines can build together.
Garry Kasparov is the optimism of the defeated. He was undisputed world chess champion at twenty-two, ranked first in the world for a record two hundred and fifty-five consecutive months, and in May 1997 he became the most famous human ever beaten in public by a machine: IBM’s Deep Blue took the match, three and a half to two and a half, and the world called it the end of human supremacy. Kasparov drew the opposite conclusion. Within a year he had invented Advanced Chess—human players equipped with computers, free to consult them throughout the game—and discovered that the most powerful configuration on a board was neither the grandmaster nor the supercomputer but the right collaboration between them. The resulting hybrid players, called
centaurs, turned out to be stronger than either component alone, and a 2005 freestyle tournament confirmed the principle at scale: two amateurs using