Carnegie Mellon graciously agreed to give me an hour of Deep Thought's time—so we would play a game of 30 minutes on each side. Armed with Levy's advice to go for a very stodgy positional game I managed, by about move 30, to establish an advantage. But it's usually necessary to engage in tactics to turn such a positional advantage into something more concrete. Sure enough, I miscalculated, and even managed to lose. Nevertheless, I felt, after this experience, that Levy had been right in his original assertion that no computer would ever be stronger than the best that carbon-based life forms could offer.

How wrong I was: less than a decade later, in 1997, IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in a contentious six-game match—later the subject of Vikram Jayanti's superb documentary film, Game Over. To Kasparov's fury, IBM retired Deep Blue as undefeated champion, rather than agree to a rematch. The final demolition of humanity occurred in 2006 when the awesomely prepared Vladimir Kramnik, then world champion, was demolished by the commercial program Deep Fritz: not only did the computer not lose a single game, it did not even look as though it might.

The result is that anyone who has about £80 to spare can now have the world's strongest chess player in his own home, on permanent standby: this is what it costs to buy Deep Fritz 11 in disc form. With some misgivings, I recently acquired this piece of killer software—and the results are as depressing as I feared. It makes analytical mincemeat of many games that you might once have treasured.

Last month, for example, I won a game in a vital club match, at one point playing what I felt was a devilish move. My opponent evidently felt so too. He looked most disconcerted by the move and subsided rapidly. The next day I ran the game through the Deep Fritz program. In less time than it takes you to read this sentence, it found a fatal flaw in the very move of which I had been so proud. For a few minutes, I sat dazed, and consumed with the thought: why bother?

We still do bother, of course. We remain hopelessly infatuated with the dream that one day we might play the perfect game, in which none of our moves, or our opponent's, could be improved upon. In the real world however, this will be achieved only by two machines, neither of which could ever have had a dream in the first place.

Here is the game from that historic 1988 tournament, in which Deep Thought, playing White, demolished Grandmaster Ivanov:

1.e4 d5 2.exd5 Nf6 3.d4 Nxd5 4.c4 Nf6 5.Nf3 Bg4 6.Be2 e6 7.Be3 Bb4+ 8.Nbd2 0-0 9.a3 Be7 10.h3 Bh5 11.0-0 c6 12.g4 Bg6 13.Nh4 Nbd7 14.Nxg6 hxg6 15.f4 c5 16.g5 Ne8 17.Ne4 Nd6 18.Nxd6 Bxd6 19.b4 cxb4 20.c5 Bc7 21.axb4 a6 22.Qc2 Qe7 23.Qe4 b6 24.Qb7 Rfc8 25.Bxa6 e5 26.fxe5 bxc5 27.Bc4 Rab8 28.Rxf7 Rxb7 29.Rf4+-and Ivanov not only resigned, but abandoned the entire event. His mortification was made complete by White's final move, which, if played by a human, could have been described as sardonic.