Demis Hassabis

You have to basically fall over the line, and then ideally you should be hospitalized but not dead.

That's when you can say you've done your best.

If you've got any energy left and you're still standing, maybe you could have tried harder.

And so at this point of life, he just assumed, OK, I'm going to be a professional chess player.

But then he goes to this tournament and he realizes, wait a minute, I need to dedicate this colossal waste of brainpower.

Maybe I should dedicate my life and energy to something more meaningful and world changing than playing a board game for the rest of my life.

So he says they experienced an epiphany.

That tournament had been packed with brilliant brains dueling over a board game until stamina was drained to nothing.

Surely that immense collective mental effort should have been harnessed to some higher cause, say science or medicine.

I thought we were wasting our minds.

And so right there and then he resolved that there must be something more.

There must be a mission, a purpose.

And so something you'll see throughout his life is that all these experiences that he has, all the things that he is learning, they fit together almost like a puzzle.

So he discovers this book that's called The Chess Computer Handbook.

It's written by this guy named David Levy.

And it says Levy introduced Demas to the themes that would animate his lifelong quest to build artificial intelligence.

The marriage of computing and chess united Demas' two worlds.

He read the book in one sitting.

Twelve-year-old Demas sets out applying Levy's principles.

He built a computer program to play a simpler game, the game Othello.