Kasparov was the John Henry of Chess

HE NINETEENTH-CENTURY African American folk legend of John Henry I pits the "steel-driving man" in a race against a new invention, a steam-powered hammer, bashing a tunnel through a mountain of rock. It was my blessing and my curse to be the John Henry of chess and artificial intelligence, as chess computers went from laughably weak to nearly unbeatable during my twenty years as the world's top chess player. As we will see, this is a pattern that has repeated over and over for centuries. Pe...

 What Makes a Person Predisposed To Science

One thing seems clear. Scientists are people, not rational automatons. They differ from other people in terms of what they do, in the things that give them satisfaction, more than in terms of completely special capacities. There is nothing you can say about them as persons that you cannot also say about some people who are not scientists. And there is almost nothing you can say about a man in some particular field of science that you cannot also say about someone in another field of science. ...