On the top floor of an old school building he dedicates hours to clever openings and creative moves together with his like-minded chess lovers. I have also read somewhere that many Nobel Prize laureates have played chess growing up, suggesting that it could improve skills required for high-level research. Maybe that’s why I’m a little extra forgiving when my son spends his time on chess.com instead of doing his homework. 

One of this year’s Nobel Laureates in Chemistry, Sir Demis Hassabis, was an incredibly talented chess player when he was younger, and he reached Master status at the age of 13. Hassabis bought his first computer using some of his chess prize money, started programming and later became a pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI) research. At Google DeepMind Hassabis and his team developed the milestone AI programs AlphaGo and AlphaZero that focused on mastering complex board games. This year he has been honored with a Nobel Prize for their development of the game-changing protein structure prediction AI program AlphaFold in 2020, which is already used by more than two million researchers.

Playing chess is what got me thinking about thinking, earned me the money to buy my first computer, and inspired me to code my first AI program.

But it all began with chess, playing and making games, states Hassabis. “Playing chess is what got me thinking about thinking, earned me the money to buy my first computer, and inspired me to code my first AI program. Amazing to reflect on how much chess shaped my life and career,” he wrote on X on International Chess Day last year.

Indeed, chess and scientific innovation can be very closely linked and there are many similarities between them, like the importance of a detailed strategy, the formulation of hypotheses, the prediction of alternative scenarios, and the pursuit of understanding complex, ever-changing systems. They both require an ability to calculate shifting variables and they both require rigor. So I think I will continue to encourage my son to play. Who knows, perhaps he will even invite me to the Nobel Banquet one day.

About the Author

Malin Otmani, M.Sc., is Editor of Nordic Life Science. This column was originally published in NLS magazine No 04 2024, out September 2024.