It's peculiar how games wax and wane in popularity. I can recall when every newspaper had a daily column on bridge --first by Charles Goren, then Omar Sharif-- but today, there is no mention of bridge partners or bridge clubs. When Bobby Fischer was playing, there was a revival of the popularity of chess in America, but today, chess seems to have gone the way of mah-jongg.

Part of the reason for its decline in popularity may be that, as told in an article in The New Yorker magazine of December 12, 2005, chess is now a game in which the best players are computer programs such as Hydra, Shredder, Junior and Fritz. The real contest, apparently, is not who can play the best game of chess, but who can write the most successful chess program. Then too, computer games of simulated combat may simply have more visual appeal than chess pieces.

Even those who have no interest in chess might find the article interesting, because it raises questions about the possibility of artificial intelligence. As opposed to Deep Blue, the program which ran on an I.B.M. supercomputer, PC chess programs cannot play using a "brute force" approach, in which all possible moves are analyzed in depth, but they analyze only a select few moves. Sometimes the programmers themselves are surprised by the imaginative moves the program makes.

Sadly, the article is not available at the New Yorker web site. Much of the story concerns the program called Hydra, which runs on a 32-processor Linux computer in Abu Dhabi, but it also says that "the reigning world champion" chess program for personal computers is Zappa. I see that Zappa is available only for Linux and Windows, and I wonder how the chess program that is bundled-in with O/S X compares to it.

I am no chess player, but I tried playing the Chess 2.1 application one time. It was enough to convince me that my chess skills are such that, rather than playing against the computer, I'd do better to have the water heater as an opponent.