For a while in the mid-2000s, a refrigerator-sized box in Abu Dhabi was considered the greatest chess player in the world. Its name was Hydra, and it was a small super-computer—a cabinet full of industrial-grade processors and specially designed chips, strung together with fiber-optic cables and jacked into the internet.
At a time when chess was still the main gladiatorial arena for competition between humans and AI, Hydra and its exploits were briefly the stuff of legend. The New Yorker published a contemplative 5,000-word feature about its emergent creativity; WIRED declared Hydra “fearsome”; and chess publications covered its victories with the violence of wrestling commentary. Hydra, they wrote, was a “monster machine” that “slowly strangled” human grand masters.
True to form as a monster, Hydra was also isolated and strange. Other advanced chess engines at the time—Hydra’s rivals—ran on ordinary PCs and were available for anyone to download. But the full power of Hydra’s 32-processor cluster could be used by only one person at a time. And by the summer of 2005, even the members of Hydra’s development team were struggling to get a turn with their creation.
That’s because the team’s patron—the then 36-year-old Emirati man who’d hired them and put up the money for Hydra’s souped-up hardware—was too busy reaping his reward. On an online chess forum in 2005, Hydra’s Austrian chief architect, Chrilly Donninger, described this benefactor as the greatest “computer chess freak” alive. “The sponsor,” he wrote, “loves to play day and night with Hydra.”
Under the username zor_champ, the Emirati sponsor would log in to online chess tournaments and, with Hydra, play as a human-computer team. More often than not, they would trounce the competition. “He loved the power of man plus machine,” one engineer told me. “He loved to win.”
Hydra eventually got overtaken by other chess computers and was discontinued in the late 2000s. But zor_champ went on to become one of the most powerful, least understood men in the world. His real name is Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan.
A bearded, wiry figure who’s almost never seen without dark sunglasses, Tahnoun is the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser—the intelligence chief to one of the world’s wealthiest and most surveillance-happy small nations. He’s also the younger brother of the country’s hereditary, autocratic president, Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan. But perhaps most important, and most bizarrely for a spymaster, Tahnoun wields official control over much of Abu Dhabi’s vast sovereign wealth. Bloomberg News reported last year that he directly oversees a $1.5 trillion empire—more cash than just about anyone on the planet.
In his personal style, Tahnoun comes across as one-third Gulf royal, one-third fitness-obsessed tech founder, and one-third Bond villain. Among his many, many business interests, he presides over a sprawling tech conglomerate called G42 (a reference to the book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which “42” is a super-computer’s answer to the question of “life, the universe, and everything”). G42 has a hand in everything from AI research to biotechnology—with special areas of strength in state-sponsored hacking and surveillance tech. Tahnoun is fanatical about Brazilian jiujitsu and cycling. He wears his sunglasses even at the gym because of a sensitivity to light, and he surrounds himself with UFC champions and mixed martial arts fighters.
According to a businessman and a security consultant who’ve met with Tahnoun, visitors who make it past his layers of loyal gatekeepers might get a chance to speak with him only after cycling laps with the sheikh around his private velodrome. He has been known to spend hours in a flotation chamber, the consultant says, and has flown health guru Peter Attia into the UAE to offer guidance on longevity. According to a businessman who was present for the discussion, Tahnoun even inspired Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince, to cut back on fast food and join him in a quest to live to 150.
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