A moment in the mid-2000s, a box the size of a refrigerator in Abu Dhabi was considered the largest chess players in the world. Its name is Hydraand it's a mini supercomputer – a cabinet filled with industrial-grade microprocessors and specially designed chips, connected together by fiber optic cables and plugged into the Internet.
At a time when chess was still the main arena for competition between humans and AI, Hydra and its exploits in short order became legendary. New Yorker published a thoughtful 5,000-word passage about its emerging creativity; WIRED claims Hydra “scary”; and chess publications covered its victories with violent wrestling commentary. Hydra, they write, is a “monster machine” that “slowly strangles” the great masters of man.
True to the shape of a monster, Hydra is also isolated and strange. Other advanced chess engines at the time—Hydra's competitors—ran on regular PCs and were available for anyone to download. But the full power of Hydra's 32-processor cluster can only be used by one person at a time. And by the summer of 2005, even members of Hydra's development team were struggling to get their creative juices flowing.
That's because the group's sponsor – a 36-year-old Emirati man who hired them and paid for Hydra's innovative hardware – was too busy to receive the reward. On an online chess forum in 2005, Hydra's Austrian chief architect, Chrilly Donninger, described the philanthropist as the greatest “computer chess fanatic” alive. “Sponsor,” he wrote, “likes to play day and night with Hydra.”
Under the username zor_champ, the UAE sponsor will log into online chess tournaments and compete with Hydra as a human-computer team. More often than not, they will beat the competition. “He loved the power of man and machine,” one engineer told me. “He likes to win.”
Hydra was eventually surpassed by other chess-playing computers and discontinued in the late 2000s. But zor_champ became one of the most powerful and least understood men in the world. His real name is Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan.
A bearded, lean man who is almost never seen without dark sunglasses, Tahnoun is the United Arab Emirates' national security adviser – the intelligence chief of one of The world's richest and most surveillance-loving small country. He is also the younger brother of the country's autocratic, hereditary president, Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan. But perhaps most important and strangest to a spy expert is that Tahnoun holds formal control over much of Abu Dhabi's vast sovereign wealth. Bloomberg News reported last year that he directly oversees an empire worth $1.5 trillion — more cash than anyone on the planet.
In his personal style, Tahnoun is considered one-third Gulf royalty, one-third fitness-obsessed tech founder and one-third Bond villain. Among his many business interests, he presides over a vast technology conglomerate called G42 (refer to the book the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where “42” is the supercomputer's answer to the question “life, the universe and everything”). G42 has its hands in everything from AI research to biotechnology—with particular strong areas being surveillance technology and state-sponsored hacking. Tahnoun is passionate about Brazilian jiujitsu and cycling. He wears sunglasses even at the gym because he's sensitive to light and surrounds himself with UFC champions and mixed martial artists.
According to a businessman and a security consultant who met Tahnoun, tourists who made it past his loyal gatekeepers might only get a chance to talk to him after cycling around with the Sheikh a few times. his own stadium. The consultant said he is known to spend hours in flotation chambers and has invited health expert Peter Attia to the UAE to provide guidance on longevity. According to a businessman present during the discussion, Tahnoun even inspired Mohammed bin Salman, the powerful crown prince of Saudi Arabia, to cut down on fast food and join him in trying to live to 150 years old.