Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Chess is far from dead when it comes down to human beings playing against
other human beings.  In regard to computers... yes, the silicon brains, I
believe, do put a very dark cloud on many on-line games [both
correspondance and real-time].  But put 2 players face-to-face in a, tournament hall,
at a chess club, coffee shop, school chess work shop, or at a kitchen table and we 
have a great game which I imagine will
continue to be played, as it is now, for a long long time to come.

No machine will ever invent a chess variant, or challenge a human to a game
unless some human directs them to do so.  So-called 'intelligent'
machines are merely reactive, not initiative, and won't do doodle-um
unless a human kickstarts them.  (Shades of 'the Matrix' and 'Y2K'. 
Ho hum..  We da man...

Chess is far from dead. As far as I know, no computer can yet *enjoy* a
game of Chess! Example: my kid enjoys tic-tac-toe, another 'dead' game?!

I don't think computers truly test the strength of artificial intelligence through application to FIDE since computers reflect the accumulated strength of years of human scholarship and practice. A sounder test would be an exotic chess variant that is relatively unexplored. For example: Could the most advanced computer beat a panel of expert chess variant specialists at microorganism chess?

Another thought: Each chess variant is itself an artificial intelligence program. When we play them, we are merely glimpsing the inner workings of the machines we have built.

Chess programs, like Deep Fritz, have recourse to immense opening and
endgame databases. So why don't the human opponents have this resource?
It's not a fair fight. /Mats

Well, I think a computer chess program constitutes much prior human
thinking beforehand, so ultimately, it is still human vs. human, the
player vs. the programmer. Further, the machine or program is dedicated to
solving the chess problem at hand, not really to defeating an opponent, in
a rather cold way, because, having no 'life,' it doesn't really care if
it loses and isn't subject to the many distractions and self-defensive or
wilfully aggressive exercises of will that color human decision-making. 
The human playing against a machine pits some 3 trillion neurons against x
number of bytes, which would seem to be a huge advantage for the human, but
focusing enough of them while ignoring distractions of life via other
sensory inputs makes it tougher.
  Maybe a sensory deprivation chamber and memory wipe would help.