Garry Kasparov(1963 — ?)

In 1985, at just 22 years old, Garry Kasparov defeated Anatoly Karpov to become the youngest world chess champion in history up to that point. Their rivalry, spread across five matches between 1984 and 1990, was one of the most intense ever seen: their first encounter was even called off after 48 games with no clear winner.

In 1996, Kasparov faced Deep Blue, an IBM supercomputer, and won the match. But the following year, in 1997, the upgraded machine took its revenge and beat him: it was the first time a computer had defeated a reigning world champion in a match played under tournament conditions, a sensational event for the entire world.

Convinced that IBM had cheated in 1997, Kasparov demanded a rematch and access to the machine's logs, but in vain. Certain that a human had intervened behind a move that was too “subtle,” he remained bitter for a long time; much later, he acknowledged that the move was probably just a simple bug in the program.

In 1985, during a world tour, Kasparov played a simultaneous exhibition against 32 different chess computers in Germany and beat all 32 of them, demonstrating the human superiority of the era over the machines.

After retiring from professional chess in 2005, Kasparov entered politics, openly opposing Vladimir Putin. Threatened and briefly detained during protests, he eventually went into exile and now lives outside Russia.