I followed the recent championship matches on chess24.com and was blown away at how compelling and engaging computers have made the game. There was a chessboard on the screen with the current board state and a computer analysis on the side estimating which player had the advantage and by how much. While waiting for players to move, I was able to test out my own ideas on the board of which moves I thought were best and see what the computer thought of them (every move I made pretty much threw the game to the opponent).

After losing to Deep Blue, Kasparov came up with the concept of "Advanced Chess," where players team up with a chess program of their choice to augment their play. At the time, a chess program with a computer coach was still superior to a chess program alone. That didn't last long, but I think Kasparov was on to something and I would love to see students paired up with open-source chess programs for tournaments that blend chess-playing proficiency with computer-programming.