Brandon Zhang :)

I loved chess way way before I even heard of chemistry. I started playing chess from the early age of 7. As I became more and more older, I spent more time on chess everyday. And not just regular chess, I loved the hobby so much I would also play fairy chess!

It wasn’t until when I was 13 years old when I bought my first chemistry book (mentioned in my previous blog). Until I was 15 years old, Chess was still my #1 passion (besides video games). Then both of them gradually leveled out. I also never considered them to be anything related to each other as one of them I have to figure out how to demolish the enemy’s king while the other I had to figure out the pKa of a random acid I’ve never heard of before.

But when I stumbled across Dennis Hassabis’s The Thinking Game I realized that they despite their extremely different goals, they are more intertwined than I ever expected. I think Dennis Hassabis has one of the coolest life stories ever and a very similar life story to mine own. He started out as a kid who loved chess since the age of 4! And I would’ve never expected his early love of strategy and problem-solving to help shape the way he thinks, and eventually it lead all the way to AI, protein folding, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

As I became more talented at chess, I realized chess is more than just moving pieces around a board. It teaches you how to think ahead, spot patterns, and stay calm when the position gets complicated. I had to tirelessly imagine lots and lots of possible outcomes and choose the best move from a huge number of options. While I didn’t fully embrace this yet, this kind of thinking seems to have stayed with Hassabis. He knew even though chess is just a game, the mental skills it builds can be powerful in real life. In his case, they became part of the way he approached science and technology.

As he got older, Hassabis moved from chess into computer science and neuroscience. I’ve never heard of this mix before since all of these subjects seem so distance from each other. But it was interesting to me because it shows he wasn’t just thinking about games. He wanted to understand intelligence itself. which is why Hassabis co-founded DeepMind, an AI company that became famous for building systems that could play games like chess and Go at an incredibly high level. But the bigger idea was never just to make a game-playing machine. It was to create AI that could solve hard problems in the real world.

Watching his documentary made me extremely surprised as I’ve never heard of some of the things he mentioned like protein folding. In chemistry and biology, protein folding is a huge deal because the shape of a protein affects how it works. If scientists can understand a protein’s structure, they can learn more about disease, medicine, and how life works at a molecular level. The problem is that predicting a protein’s 3D shape is really difficult. It’s kind of like trying to solve the most complicated puzzle ever, with way too many possibilities. Hassabis’s DeepMind used AI to do exactly that, and it changed science in a major way. Which was the main reason he ended up winning the Nobel prize in chemistry

I think, consdering that chess and chemistry are so different, is that Hassabis is so amazing by showing how something that began with chess ended up helping solve one of the biggest problems in chemistry. Chess helped train his mind to handle complexity, and that mindset carried into everything he did afterward. From games to AI to Chemistry, it feels like one long chain of curiosity and smart thinking.

That’s why Demis Hassabis is such an inspiring figure to me. He shows that interests people sometimes dismiss as “just a hobby” can actually shape your future in a huge way. If you love chess, math, science, coding, or any kind of problem-solving like I do (especially chess), it’s worth remembering that those skills can connect in surprising ways. Hassabis’s story proves that a love of strategy can lead to real-world discoveries that help millions of people.