In fact, the latter made for a very funny moment in one of the Star Trek movies, when Commander Scott, disguised as a 20th century engineer, forgot himself and began speaking into the mouse, addressing it as 'computer'. It was not very long ago that the notion of a chess playing computer belonged only to science fiction. It was a romantic idea, but a remote one. Today, it only requires a trip to your local Toys 'R Us to put your hands on a chess playing computer. But think of the possibilities.
Chess is a microworld based on a rigid scheme of rules, actions and transformations.
In this way, it is much like a mathematical notation, or a linguistic structure. In fact, a game of chess is essentially a 'dialog' between two players in an abstract and formal language. With the appearance of chess playing programs, it has become possible to 'converse' with a computer in this sense. Alan Turing formulated an informal test for machine intelligence. And while these simple advances encourage us that the human-computer interface has indeed improved dramatically, and will continue to do so, there have also been some rather striking failures.