Nowadays chess is more and more about human-computer chess matches and for a while, forty years ago, it was quite unclear whether any chess  program would ever be able to defeat the expertise of top humans. That`s why, in 1969 International Master David Levy made a famous bet, that no chess computer will be able to beat him in the next ten years. In 1978, he won his bet by beating Chess 4.7, the strongest computer at the time and predicted that it would not be so long before he would be surpassed and he was right again as it has been proved in 1989, when David Levy was defeated by the computer Deep Thought in an exhibition match.

At that time, Deep Thought was still below the World Championship Levels, as then number one chess-player of the world Garry Kasparov demonstrated with his two victories from 1989. It was not until 1996, when Kasparov lost his first game to a computer with IBM`s Deep Blue at a tournament.  It was the first time for the reigning world champion to loose to a computer using regular time controls but he regrouped himself to win three and draw two of the remaining five games of the match for an actual convincing victory. In May 1997, an updated version of the Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in a return event and with an increasing processing power, chess programs running on commercially available workstations began to rival top players.

Most of these games were not played at normal time controls and as a result, at least  in fast games, computers played better than humans but at classical time controls, at which a player`s rating is determined, the advantage was not so clear. In 2000, commercially available programs such as Junior or Fritz were able to draw matches against former champion Garry Kasparov and classical world champion Vladimir Kramnik. In 2005 , Hydra, a dedicated chess computer with custom hardware and sixty-four processors and also winner of the 14th IPCCC in the same year defeated seventh ranked Michael Adams and chess engines continue to improve. In 2009, chess engines running on slower hardware have reached the grandmaster level, as a result a mobile phone won a category 6 tournament, a performance rating 2898. Chess engine, Hiarcs 13 running inside the Pocket Fritz 4 on the mobile phone HTC Touch HD won the Copa Mercosur in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Pocket Fritz4 searches less than 20,000 positions per second in contrast to supercomputers such as Deep Blue, that searched 200 million positions per second bu the Pocket Fritz 4`s higher performance came from being smarter and not faster.

In the beginning, no one understood all the ramifications of having a super-grandmaster on its laptop and what would this mean for professional chess, but chess computers definitely have an effect on the quality of human chess. In 1998, Kasparov launched Advanced Chess, a form of chess where a human plays against another human and both have access to computers to enhance their strength. The result was an advanced player, stronger than a human or computer alone, although this has not been proven. A rapid proliferation of powerful chess software and the heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn`t care about style,  patterns or hundred of years of established theory. It just counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves and counts them up again.