The improvement of computer chess in the last 20 years, say from the seventies till the nineties is impressive. In the late seventies my friend Marc had a small chess computer against which we both played a lot. Unfortunately it was not as strong as we hoped, but at least it made legal moves, although we didnt have to make legal moves ourselves.
Now, in the late nineties, our present human world champion has lost a match over six games against Deep Blue, the successor of Deep Thought, named after the computer which took seven and a half million years to calculate the answer to life, the universe & everything, as described in that jolly remarkable book The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Now that a computer has beaten the human world champion does this mean that computers play better chess than humans? Not to my opinion. After all it was just a single match. It's a pity that Deep Blue hasn't played any other players or computers. Appearantly IBM wants to create the impression that no one else but Kasparov is strong enough to be a worthy opponent.
There are some players who have an excellent score against computers though. John van der Wiel for example has never lost a single game against these things. His style didn't seem suited to beat computers, so this came a a surprise to me. Optimism, tactics and tricks are his main strength. Not exactly the qualities to outweird a computer, are they? But when I saw the games I was stunned. He played very differenty. 1.c3 for example, and kept the position closed. Clearly he's the opinion that you better not play theory against a data base. I wondered how he could leave behind his own style so easy? Luckily he gave the answer himself, but unfortunately I still don't understand it: 'Playing against a computer is not chess. It's just some other game, though it resembles chess a lot.'
Another 'comp killer' is Yasser Seirawan. His score against computers is about as good as Wiels', but Yasser doesnt need to adjust his play: his solid and positional style is good enough.
So the fact that Deep Blue beat Kasparov doesnt mean that much.
Only when the digital world champion has beaten us all, I'll tip my hat to the damned thing, and admit that it plays better than us.

Hmm, the above was written shortly after the Deep Blue match in 1997.
Now, februari 2007 ten years have past and things have changed drastically. In autumn 2006 Kramnik played Deep Fritz in what I considered to be the last possibility to hold back the computer. As a great Kramnik supporter I optimistically predicted 3 vs 3, but everyone else said that Deep Fritz would win. Indeed the omens were clearly not in Kramniks favour. In 2005, for example, Michael Adams lost 0.5 - 5.5 versus Hydra. This caused a shock in the chess world. Adams has a very solid style and clearly no human opponent would be able to beat him with such a score. Kramniks style was at least as solid as Adams' and besides he had just won the reunification match versus Topalov, so there was no doubt about who was the REAL world champion anymore. If he couldn't do it, who could?
I considered Kramnik as a brave knight who was going to fight for the whole human race. Unfortunately others didn't share this view:
'He plays sooo boring!'
'What was he doing on the toilet all of the time?'
'Deep Fritz will beat him!'
You see? He fights for us all, and this is what he gets...

He lost the match 2 - 4.

In chess the age of man is history...