Garry Kasparov became the youngest world chess champion at 22
the gist
On 9 November 1985, Garry Kasparov defeated Anatoly Karpov in Moscow to become the World Chess Champion at the age of 22, then the youngest ever. Their rivalry was one of the most intense in chess: an earlier match in 1984-85 had been stopped without a result after 48 games, which caused controversy, and the 1985 match was a fresh contest. Kasparov held the title until 2000 and was ranked the world number one for a record 255 months. His peak rating of 2851 in 1999 stood as the highest until Magnus Carlsen surpassed it in 2013. In 1997 he lost a match to IBM's Deep Blue computer, a landmark in artificial intelligence.
so what
Kasparov's rise marked a generational change in chess and ushered in an era of more dynamic, computer-assisted preparation.
fun fact
The match with Deep Blue in 1997 was the first time a reigning world champion lost a match to a computer under standard conditions.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · text CC BY-SA 4.0
Photo: Fryta 73 from Strzegom, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.
how it works
To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.
so what
A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.
the bigger pattern
Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.
fun fact
In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.
more on this
background
A Corner in Wheat is a 1909 American short silent film which tells of a greedy tycoon who tries to corner the market in wheat, destroying the lives of the people who can no longer afford to buy bread. It was directed by D. W. Griffith and adapted by Griffith and Frank E. Woods from a novel and a short story by Frank Norris, titled The Pit and "A Deal in Wheat". Griffith may have had a real-life inspiration: six months earlier, James A. Patten had actually cornered the market in wheat, and in some cities, the price of bread doubled from five cents to ten, just as in the movie.
In 1994, A Corner in Wheat was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
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