Garry Kasparov

Russian chess grandmaster, born in Baku, whose matches against IBM's Deep BlueDeep Blue, prop. n.: IBM's chess computer that beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, the first time a machine defeated a reigning world champion in a match under standard tournament conditions. became the defining contest between human and machine intelligence. He held the world title from 1985 to 2000 and was the top-rated player for most of two decades. In February 1996 he beat the machine 4–2, although it won the first game, the first time a reigning world champion had lost a game to a computer at standard time controls; in the May 1997 rematch in New York he lost 3½–2½. He suggested that the IBM team might have had human help during the games, which IBM denied; it declined a further match and retired the machine. He then championed 'advanced chess' (1998), in which each player teams with a computer, and argued that a human and machine working through a good process can outperform stronger machines alone, the centaurcentaur, n.: A human and an AI working as a team, each doing what it does best, like a chess player who consults a computer before every move. The name comes from the mythical half-human, half-horse creature. model of human–AI collaboration developed in his book 'Deep Thinking' (2017).