Yes, it is. I am proud that I could make a difference to chess in my country and that I could be a catalyst. I remember how unattainable the GM title felt once upon a time.

If it’s one thing, obviously it had to have been being selected to make the first manned space flight for the United States. That was competition at its best, not because of the fame or the recognition that went with it, but because of the fact that America’s best test pilots went through this selection process, down to seven guys, and of those seven, I was the first one to go. That always will be the most satisfying thing for me.

Oh, hands down, I’m most proud of the people that I’ve trained and the people that have come from my work — I mean from my lab. I think that when I look at these younger people who are now working in their own right, running research laboratories, doing great work, teaching their students, making new discoveries, that’s what I’m proudest of. That legacy of science that stemmed from — originally — just me opening up my shop at Yale University back in 1994.

I take great pride in the fact that we have a whole movement of people that are working on these cases, obviously, to get innocent people out of prison, and identify those who really committed the crime. But most importantly, it is a movement of criminal justice reform. And that we have made a big difference, I hope, in the system. We have prosecutors forming what we call “conviction integrity” units to try to look at miscarriages of justice and work cooperatively with defense lawyers to change the results. We are really trying to make some fundamental changes in the way the criminal justice system operates.