Metacognition

Congratulations to Sir Demis Hassabis, who last week was awarded a Nobel prize for his work on AlphaFold, which uses artificial intelligence to predict the structure of proteins. Developed by DeepMind, AlphaFold belongs to the same family of work as AlphaZero, which revolutionised computer chess when it was released in 2017, and before that AlphaGo, which in 2015 was the first program to defeat a professional Go player.

I had the honour of partnering with Hassabis for the Pro-Biz Cup at the London Chess Classic in 2021. Now CEO of Google Deepmind, at 13 he ranked second in his age group behind Judit Polgar. There is no doubt that his youthful fascination with strategy games sowed the seeds of his scientific achievement. Between 1998 and 2003, Hassabis was a five-time winner of the ‘Pentamind’ event (playing five different classic strategy games) at the Mind Sports Olympiad. After graduating from Cambridge with a double first in computer science, he founded Elixir Studios, where he applied his early interest in AI to computer game development, before returning to academia to study neuroscience.