[Vladimir] Putin needs wars to legitimize his position.

I would say that when you go to the very, very top, it's an ability to come up with new ideas, with something new, to make the difference. Every world champion, every player who was traversing this universe, managed to bring something new to the game. This ability to always find some unconventional ways. That makes the final difference.

I can't think of a scenario under which [Vladimir Putin] would gradually resign from power. For him and those around him, power became a source of unlimited enrichment. A loss of power would be tantamount to an annihilation of the economic success that has been achieved so far.

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.

The biggest problem I see among people who want to excel in chess – and in business and in life in general – is not trusting their instincts enough.

The Far East and Eastern Siberia are already developing according to a Chinese scenario, the full scope of which will be revealed in the near future. In the next 10 to 15 years, a lot of Russian territories will become at least de facto Chinese. This will change the situation in Russia fundamentally.

Machines taking over jobs - it's the history of civilization. Replacing farm animals, old forms of manual labor, now taking over small, menial aspects of cognition. But there's still plenty of room for creativity, for curiosity - many things that are related to passion, like art. But also, things about human communication and challenges, massive challenges that we left behind because we didn't want to take so much risk, such as space exploration, deep ocean exploration.