23-Year-Old Chess Grandmaster Whips Bill Gates In 71 Seconds

MojoKid writes "There's no disputing that Bill Gates is blessed with a brilliant mind. Sure, he dropped out of Harvard College, but he got accepted into the elite institution of higher learning in the first place. Leading into his college career, Gates scored 1,590 out of 1,600 on the SAT. The rest is history — he went on to co-found Microsoft, built a net worth that's in the billions ($76.8 billion at last count), and now spends his time on his philanthropic efforts. Regardless, it took 23-year-old Magnus Carlsen, a "grandmaster" Chess player since the age of 13 and new world Chess champion, just 71 seconds to defeat Gates in a friendly game of Chess on a Norwegian television show. It takes longer to heat up a cup of water in the microwave."

Comments

"Brilliant"? Not from the samples I have seen...

[gweihir]

More like "ruthless", "greedy", and "does not care how much damage he does as long as he profits". Also surprising incompetent with regard to technology. This person will go down in history as the reason the computer revolution was delayed by a few decades, because he managed to push his sub-standard technology into the market in a small window of opportunity.

As to the grand-master though, any grand-master will wipe the flow with anybody who is not, genius does not play a role here.

Re:Big deal.

[Zero__Kelvin]

" By the time Gates was ~25 (i.e., similar age) he had stitched up IBM in probably the biggest ever deal in the history of software (for DOS) ..."

Evidently you don't know very much about software, or the history of Microsoft. There is no 1 deal that explains Microsoft, but even if there was, there were already plenty of much bigger deals made in the software industry prior to that. It was hundreds of back room double dealings that caused Microsoft to become the behemoth that it is, and has absolutely nothing to do with Gates being any kind of "software genius." The truth is he can't write decent software and never could, is no visionary, and merely saw the potential of applying the Mafia business model to a software company.

""There's no disputing that Bill Gates is blessed with a brilliant mind."

This is the most horrendous line in the article if for no other reason than it is just plain wrong. Gates has an Evil mind; that doesn't make it "brilliant".