Osma Harvilahti

When I was ten or eleven, my mother put a handwritten motto on the top of my bed that read, "If not you, who else?" She spent her entire life and her whole energy on me, not just as a mother but as everything—a manager, a friend, a teacher. It couldn't compensate for the absence of my father, who died of leukemia when I was seven, but it helped me overcome the psychological trauma. From a very early age, my life had a purpose. I could make all sorts of mistakes in my daily life, but in chess it was always: Concentrate, work, stay on top of your game. Because we all get complacent. I call it the "gravity of past success." You win and you think, I can rest on my laurels. The only way to stay in the game is to challenge yourself, because then you're never short of challenges.

Aptitude for playing chess is nothing more than aptitude for playing chess. I took on thirty- two machines and won, in 1985, and I beat the first prototype of Deep Blue, which was called Deep Thought, in 1989. That was a golden era: Machines were weak, my hair was thick. I won my first match against Deep Blue four to two, but the writing was on the wall.

You cannot bluff a machine. You used to have an opponent with certain characteristics—this player wants to play short games, this player wants to play more solid games—and you could see when he or she was getting upset or growing more confident. Chess is not a poker game, but there was always a psychological element. With a machine—I don't know what you call it, he, she, whatever—one inaccuracy means that's it: You lose all the advantages you have been accumulating over fifty moves. You have to mobilize every resource you have to avoid defeat. It's a weird form of intelligence, but at the end of the day, intelligence is about results. The only way for us to avoid becoming redundant is to keep coming up with new challenges, new areas of engagement where machines will still be learning from us.

"As Ronald Reagan warned, 'Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.' "

When people ask me, "How did chess help you in your political endeavors?" I say, "Not at all. In chess, we have fixed rules and unpredictable results; in Putin's Russia, it's exactly the opposite." What I brought from chess to Russian "politics" was notoriety. People would realize that if this man was opposing Putin, it must be a matter of principle, a moral duty. I had to try. The greatest difficulty for me was moving into something where I knew it was not a game that I could win. I realized that my life was not just about winning but about making a difference.

Dictators don't have strategy. A dictator cares only about his survival, political and physical. You may call it the "strategy of survival," but it's purely tactical. The advantage of democracy over dictatorship is that democracy can afford long-term planning. One of my biggest heroes is Harry S. Truman, because he built institutions like NATO and the National Security Council, which secured the American victory in the cold war forty years later, knowing that he would not see the final outcome.

It can happen here! As Ronald Reagan warned, "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction." With Trump and his entire inner circle, every time we look for some foreign conflict of interest, it points to Russia, Russia, Russia. I believe in coincidences, but I also believe in KGB. There's a lot of damage being done, and probably more will be done, but the political system here has been revitalized. The court stopped the immigration order! It shows that Putin's propaganda lied: Democracy works.

The game is not over until it's over, until the clock is stopped. In my match with [Anatoly] Karpov, I was trailing five to nothing; one more loss and I'm out of the game. It would be a very deep wound, losing six to nothing, and for Karpov it would be the greatest victory of all. But I survived. I survived for weeks, for months, and I won three games. [The match was eventually declared a draw.] Now, any time I feel something is an insurmountable challenge, I say, "Wait a second—is it worse than five to nil?" Yeah, I may lose, but I will never stop trying, because there's always a chance. My mother told me, "You lose the game when you stop fighting."

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io