Judit Polgár

Judit Polgár (born 1976 in Budapest) is universally regarded as the strongest female chess player of all time. Raised in her father László’s famous homeschooling experiment, she became the youngest grandmaster in history at 15 — breaking Bobby Fischer’s record — and remains the only woman ever to crack the world top ten, defeating Kasparov, Karpov, Carlsen, and eleven world champions in all before retiring from competition in 2014.

The first profession AI conquered

Chess was the first field remade by machine intelligence, and Polgár lived through the whole arc — from Deep Blue’s 1997 win over Kasparov to the engine-driven preparation that now dominates elite play. She has described the transition as personally painful: after losing a game where she trusted an engine’s recommendation over her own instinct, she recalled asking, “So who should you trust?” As a child prodigy her only higher-rated age-group peer was a 12-year-old Demis Hassabis, who went on to found DeepMind.

In a May 2026 Forbes interview, Polgár — the subject of the 2025 Netflix documentary “Queen of Chess” — drew on that history to advise educators facing AI. She sees “the same fear, the same worry, the same dilemmas” in teachers that chess players once felt, and argues the answer is engagement, not retreat. Her warning is aimed at shortcuts, not the technology: an AI answer without understanding is “passive knowledge.”

Through the Judit Polgár Foundation and her Global Chess Festival she promotes chess as an educational tool, and she frames AI the same way: a powerful instrument that must be paired with struggle, failure, and human connection. “Knowledge can be reached in a second for a kid from their phones,” she told Forbes. “So that’s not important. The important is the human connection.”