As all the games in Harvard Cup this year restricted each player to 50 minutes to make all his moves, or lose the game automatically, the computers are handicapped by the limit on the number of possible moves they can consider. A very smart program may be good at estimating which moves are optimal or near-optimal, but most systems, like their human counterparts, play much better without time constraints.

Knowing that computers rely mostly on the brute force technique to make their moves, some human chess masters have no doubt figured out how to take advantage of the machines' naivete. But most are awed by how well the computers can play.

"They have a lot more respect for the machines than they did a decade ago," says Edelman, now a student at Columbia Business School, "and it's no longer considered a humiliation to lose to a computer."

But will computers someday beat humans in all games? Most human chess masters doubt, or at least convince themselves to doubt, that computer players will ever be as good as the best humans.

As the machines get better and better each year, however, it becomes difficult to imagine that humans will always be able to dominate the world of chess, especially when today's researchers try to build programs that can mimic the way grandmasters play--with help from the latter.

"We expect that very soon the computers will play better than the best human minds," acknowledges Edelman.

Haibin Jiu '94, associate photography chair of The Crimson, is the former president of the Harvard Computer Society. His column appears Tuesdays.