The New York Review of Books features a long piece by Garry Kasparov (it’s actually a book review) in which he discusses what it means to be an expert chess player and ponders the history of human vs. machine chess matches.
It was my luck (perhaps my bad luck) to be the world chess champion during the critical years in which computers challenged, then surpassed, human chess players. Before 1994 and after 2004 these duels held little interest. The computers quickly went from too weak to too strong. But for a span of ten years these contests were fascinating clashes between the computational power of the machines (and, lest we forget, the human wisdom of their programmers) and the intuition and knowledge of the grandmaster.