It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a human achievement by the members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.

Results show that just one year of chess tuition will improve a student's learning abilities, concentration, application, sense of logic, self-discipline, respect, behavior and the ability to take responsibility for his/her own actions.

I think we have very steady records of President Putin, who inherited the country with democratic values.

To my surprise I found that when other top players in the precomputer age (before 1995, roughly) wrote about games in magazines and newspaper columns, they often made more mistakes in their annotations than the players had made at the board.

I think Russians today have a distorted picture of capitalism, liberal democracy and market economy.

The sanctions and travel restrictions would have to be far more comprehensive to be truly painful for [Vladimir] Putin and his inner circle. And the new middle class should also feel the effects of what he is doing. For instance, we should ask those who wish to enter the EU whether they have visited illegally occupied Crimea in the last few months and, if the answer is "yes," deny them a visa.

More and more people in my country recognise the dangers of having their governors appointed by Putin and having no influence in parliament because Parliament today is also following instructions from Kremlin and no longer represents its people.