The era of man versus machine in chess is having its final curtain call. The actors may now gracefully accept the accolades and flowers, and take their bows. The drama has lost its intensity in recent years as machine domination has become inevitable.

The recent crushing defeat of Michael Adam by the Adu Dhabi chess computer Hydra - aptly named The Destroyer - appears to be the final act. What remains will be mopping up and commentary.

It's been an engaging enterprise of human scientific curiosity and ingenuity. There are of course, wonderful stories and images that linger.

I recall a young Gary Kasparov telling me that defeat by computers would be a tragedy for mankind. He did not imagine that, a decade later, he would become the self-appointed symbol for what he feared the most. Nor could he have imagined that he would earn millions in waging his own computer wars and would himself become an enduring subject of legend and myth as a result

Ironically, chess-playing programs and databases are now his constant companions and tireless unpaid assistants. They have raised his level of play and probably prolonged his effective playing career.

The heroes in this saga are both the wonderful conceptualizers and tinkerers who designed the machines and the human players who with equal curiosity and wonder eagerly engaged them.

I fondly cherish my own firsthand encounters with many of these pioneers.

The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery--even if mixed with fear-that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only
accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms-it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious
attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his
creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvellous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.