I think chess — actually, a number of things that I learned when I was young — it wasn't so much the chess itself; it was the skills that you were training while you were playing chess. So problem-solving, imagination, creative thinking, strategic thinking, all of these things — if you play chess to a high level, what you're really honing is those meta-skills. And I realized from quite young, that's one of the reasons I liked chess was this is a great practice for me to get good — sort of like a mental gym, if you like — to get really good at those other skills, which you could then translate to all sorts of other subjects like science or business.
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Demis Hassabis
Co-founder and chief executive of Google DeepMind; Nobel laureate in Chemistry
United Kingdom · b. 1976
Technology
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Co-founded the artificial-intelligence company DeepMind in London in 2010, acquired by Google in 2014. Shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Jumper and David Baker for work on protein-structure prediction. Was a chess prodigy and a games designer before returning to academia for a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience.
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