For some time within the mid-2000s, a refrigerator-sized field in Abu Dhabi was thought-about the best chess participant on the earth. Its identify was Hydra, and it was a small super-computer—a cupboard stuffed with industrial-grade processors and specifically designed chips, strung along with fiber-optic cables and jacked into the web.
At a time when chess was nonetheless the primary gladiatorial enviornment for competitors between people and AI, Hydra and its exploits have been briefly the stuff of legend. The New Yorker revealed a contemplative 5,000-word characteristic about its emergent creativity; WIRED declared Hydra “fearsome”; and chess publications lined its victories with the violence of wrestling commentary. Hydra, they wrote, was a “monster machine” that “slowly strangled” human grand masters.
True to type as a monster, Hydra was additionally remoted and unusual. Different superior chess engines on the time—Hydra’s rivals—ran on atypical PCs and have been obtainable for anybody to obtain. However the full energy of Hydra’s 32-processor cluster could possibly be utilized by just one individual at a time. And by the summer time of 2005, even the members of Hydra’s improvement crew have been struggling to get a flip with their creation.
That’s as a result of the crew’s patron—the then 36-year-old Emirati man who’d employed them and put up the cash for Hydra’s souped-up {hardware}—was too busy reaping his reward. On a web based chess discussion board in 2005, Hydra’s Austrian chief architect, Chrilly Donninger, described this benefactor as the best “pc chess freak” alive. “The sponsor,” he wrote, “likes to play day and evening with Hydra.”
Beneath the username zor_champ, the Emirati sponsor would log in to on-line chess tournaments and, with Hydra, play as a human-computer crew. As a rule, they’d trounce the competitors. “He beloved the ability of man plus machine,” one engineer advised me. “He beloved to win.”
Hydra finally acquired overtaken by different chess computer systems and was discontinued within the late 2000s. However zor_champ went on to change into some of the highly effective, least understood males on the earth. His actual identify is Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan.
A bearded, wiry determine who’s virtually by no means seen with out darkish sun shades, Tahnoun is the United Arab Emirates’ nationwide safety adviser—the intelligence chief to one of many world’s wealthiest and most surveillance-happy small nations. He’s additionally the youthful brother of the nation’s hereditary, autocratic president, Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan. However maybe most essential, and most bizarrely for a spymaster, Tahnoun wields official management over a lot of Abu Dhabi’s huge sovereign wealth. Bloomberg Information reported final 12 months that he instantly oversees a $1.5 trillion empire—more money than simply about anybody on the planet.
In his private fashion, Tahnoun comes throughout as one-third Gulf royal, one-third fitness-obsessed tech founder, and one-third Bond villain. Amongst his many, many enterprise pursuits, he presides over a sprawling tech conglomerate known as G42 (a reference to the ebook The Hitchhiker’s Information to the Galaxy, through which “42” is a super-computer’s reply to the query of “life, the universe, and the whole lot”). G42 has a hand in the whole lot from AI analysis to biotechnology—with particular areas of power in state-sponsored hacking and surveillance tech. Tahnoun is fanatical about Brazilian jiujitsu and biking. He wears his sun shades even on the health club due to a sensitivity to gentle, and he surrounds himself with UFC champions and combined martial arts fighters.
In line with a businessman and a safety guide who’ve met with Tahnoun, guests who make it previous his layers of loyal gatekeepers may get an opportunity to talk with him solely after biking laps with the sheikh round his non-public velodrome. He has been identified to spend hours in a flotation chamber, the guide says, and has flown well being guru Peter Attia into the UAE to supply steerage on longevity. In line with a businessman who was current for the dialogue, Tahnoun even impressed Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s highly effective crown prince, to chop again on quick meals and be part of him in a quest to reside to 150.
