The backbone of Venture Café – come meet the community and make connections with all different kinds of innovators. How will you make your serendipitous moment come true?
Chess has quietly served as a testing ground for artificial intelligence since long before AI was a discipline. Claude Shannon programmed a computer to play it in 1950, Deep Blue used it to beat a world champion, and Stockfish, AlphaZero, and today's reinforcement learning research all treat it as their proving ground. This session hands that history to the room: search, dynamic programming, self-play, and reinforcement learning stop being abstractions and become moves on a board, using historical puzzles that lead naturally into the algorithms running today's AI systems.
Tamer Karatekin leads the session, connecting chess to AI, education, history, and design as one throughline rather than four separate topics. He is bringing five to ten Şahî chess sets, a contemporary board he designed and produced himself, drawing on the game's cultural history, and making its Boston/Cambridge debut here.
After the talk, the room opens up for informal play on the Şahî boards. Karatekin starts it off by introducing Suli's Diamond, a four-piece endgame that stumped solvers for over a thousand years, plus the new configuration he discovered in 2026 that makes it roughly fifty percent harder still. From there, each player chooses: take on the puzzle, or just play a game.
The talk draws on three of Karatekin's ongoing projects: DeepSeaChess.com, ChessCoding.ai, an educational initiative teaching computer science and AI through chess, and SHATRANJ.AI, an EU-funded program connecting chess heritage to mathematics, coding, and AI education.
Karatekin is an MIT alumnus, FIDE Master and Trainer, and former first-board player for the MIT chess team. He has previously spoken at TEDxBoston, with "Chess: Bridging Cultures, Inspiring AI, and Redefining Education," and at the IEEE Global Technology Forum, with "The Intertwined History of Chess and Artificial Intelligence."
No chess experience or programming background required. This is built for technologists, educators, founders, students, designers, and anyone curious about AI.
Details coming soon!
An intimate roundtable on innovation, unanswered questions, and future possibilities
Women’s health is receiving long-overdue attention just as AI is reshaping research, prevention, personalized care, and health education. Where are these fields converging, what are the challenges, and what new collaborations could move women’s health forward?
This roundtable brings together founders, practitioners, researchers, investors, technologists, educators, and others invested in women’s health to explore where the field is now and where it could go next.
We’ll begin by mapping the perspectives in the room, then discuss where AI is already making an impact, which challenges it might help address, what unexpected connections are emerging, and what gives us reason to be hopeful.
Rather than a formal presentation, this will be a candid, participatory conversation designed to surface ideas, identify opportunities, and shape better questions about the future of women’s health.
If you’re working in, investing in, researching, building for, or simply curious about the future of women’s health, we invite you to join us. Register to take part in the conversation, bring your questions, and help shape what comes next.
The backbone of Venture Café – come meet the community and make connections with all different kinds of innovators. How will you make your serendipitous moment come true?
Chess has quietly served as a testing ground for artificial intelligence since long before AI was a discipline. Claude Shannon programmed a computer to play it in 1950, Deep Blue used it to beat a world champion, and Stockfish, AlphaZero, and today's reinforcement learning research all treat it as their proving ground. This session hands that history to the room: search, dynamic programming, self-play, and reinforcement learning stop being abstractions and become moves on a board, using historical puzzles that lead naturally into the algorithms running today's AI systems.
Tamer Karatekin leads the session, connecting chess to AI, education, history, and design as one throughline rather than four separate topics. He is bringing five to ten Şahî chess sets, a contemporary board he designed and produced himself, drawing on the game's cultural history, and making its Boston/Cambridge debut here.
After the talk, the room opens up for informal play on the Şahî boards. Karatekin starts it off by introducing Suli's Diamond, a four-piece endgame that stumped solvers for over a thousand years, plus the new configuration he discovered in 2026 that makes it roughly fifty percent harder still. From there, each player chooses: take on the puzzle, or just play a game.
The talk draws on three of Karatekin's ongoing projects: DeepSeaChess.com, ChessCoding.ai, an educational initiative teaching computer science and AI through chess, and SHATRANJ.AI, an EU-funded program connecting chess heritage to mathematics, coding, and AI education.
Karatekin is an MIT alumnus, FIDE Master and Trainer, and former first-board player for the MIT chess team. He has previously spoken at TEDxBoston, with "Chess: Bridging Cultures, Inspiring AI, and Redefining Education," and at the IEEE Global Technology Forum, with "The Intertwined History of Chess and Artificial Intelligence."
No chess experience or programming background required. This is built for technologists, educators, founders, students, designers, and anyone curious about AI.
Details coming soon!
An intimate roundtable on innovation, unanswered questions, and future possibilities
Women’s health is receiving long-overdue attention just as AI is reshaping research, prevention, personalized care, and health education. Where are these fields converging, what are the challenges, and what new collaborations could move women’s health forward?
This roundtable brings together founders, practitioners, researchers, investors, technologists, educators, and others invested in women’s health to explore where the field is now and where it could go next.
We’ll begin by mapping the perspectives in the room, then discuss where AI is already making an impact, which challenges it might help address, what unexpected connections are emerging, and what gives us reason to be hopeful.
Rather than a formal presentation, this will be a candid, participatory conversation designed to surface ideas, identify opportunities, and shape better questions about the future of women’s health.
If you’re working in, investing in, researching, building for, or simply curious about the future of women’s health, we invite you to join us. Register to take part in the conversation, bring your questions, and help shape what comes next.