We assume that as computers get better, they are going to pull away from us, beating us more and more easily, particularly in such circumscribed logical exercises as chess. Not so. Since 1997 machines have gotten so much stronger that even off-the-shelf ones now routinely massacre the ordinary player. But the great players are learning to adapt. Genius is keeping up.
An interesting column by Charles Krauthammer on computer chess, specifically the recent Kasparov/X3D Fritz match. He's wrong, though, about Moore's Law (the rule-of-thumb that computers generally double in power every eighteen months ) being determinative on the progress of computer chess. The software is much more important. One of the strongest commercially-available packages, Fritz 8 (X3D's baby brother), which I have, will run on a Win 98 machine with 32 megs of RAM and maybe 1GB of diskspace if you install the largest opening databases.
But he's spot-on with his analysis of human strategy versus the computer's infallible tactical ability. The (very) few times I've beaten Fritz came out of static, locked-down positions like Krauthammer describes.
Anyway, it's worth reading if you're into this kind of stuff.