Right, left, Greens, Baathists, whatever: it comes down to grabbing and holding power and using ideology - or religion, race - as a justification.

Constructs like race will decline in relevance in a roboticized world. That how well one human subset or community - a race, a nationality, a religion - is doing will be secondary to how well humanity in general is doing in face of the robot revolution.

I dropped the King's Indian in 1997 after one too many bad experiences against Kramnik.

I wouldn't place much stock in numbers. I don't believe that they reflect Putin's true popularity. Just think about how the pollsters proceed. They call people and they ask them questions on the street. In today's Russia, it takes a lot of courage to tell a stranger something critical about the head of the Kremlin. And yet more than 20 percent do so nonetheless.

In Armenia, the power de facto belongs to those who opted to take violent action in Karabakh. We are dealing with a military dictatorship that utilizes some kind of democratic procedures.

It is quite clear, however, that there won't be any real changes with the current clan structure having seized power in the course of the Karabakh conflict.

Excelling at chess has long been considered a symbol of more general intelligence. That is an incorrect assumption in my view, as pleasant as it might be.