We have recently watched a new hero emerge in the world of sports. Tiger Woods has taken golf to a new plateau with his brilliant play in the Augusta Masters. He has shown the world what a combination of hard work and talent can do. Moreover, he has created an unprecedented interest among youth in his sport.

Two other new heros will emerge in the weeks to come. Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov are taking chess to new levels of excellence, and the world will watch with similar admiration.

Both have shown what can be done with hard work and talent and imagination. Fortunate to have been born a genius, no one works harder to be champion than Garry Kasparov; the Deep Blue team is composed of the cream of scientific talent, and they too work with a passion and dedication to their mission.

In the last year, Garry Kasparov has played some of his finest chess and is coming to New York at the top of his career. Deep Blue will be significantly stronger too, searching twice as many positions per second and searching them with enhanced chess knowledge. The match promises to be an outstanding contest, even more thrilling than last year's. We are going to witness dramatic history at the chess table.

But more than an exciting battle, this match -- as was last year's in Philadelphia -- will be remembered as a landmark in the evolution of mankind's powerful new tool. Who of the early pioneers in computer chess -- Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, Herbert Simon, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann -- would have imagined in the late 1950s when an IBM 704 first played chess that 40 years later computers would be a million times more powerful? Who then would have imagined that in 1997 a computer would be examining 200,000,000 chess positions per second and searching to depths of 14 levels when making a move.

But science is filled with surprises and developing a chess program has had its share. Researchers in the 1950s and 1960s felt that if computers were to play chess at the level of the best humans -- a task many said required intelligence -- they should be programmed to play like grandmasters. Many maintained that computers should be programmed in sophisticated programming languages that would make it easy for programmers to incorporate the thought process of grandmasters into their programs.

In addition, computers should be programmed to carry out some sort of selective search as we envision grandmasters do. But Deep Blue has followed a different path. It is programmed in C, a language that looks more like assembly language than anything fit for chess, and the brute force approach taken by Deep Blue's alpha-beta search is apparently in vivid contrast with the search done by grandmasters.

This is not to say that we haven't learned a lot about human intelligence and solving complex problems.

First, we realize that the sheer power of computers, combined with our creative mind, will permit us to solve many problems that have seemed beyond our reach. We have witnessed a million-fold increase in computer power over the last 40 years, and we are beginning to understand the implications of another million-fold increase. We have seen the process of software development go through revolutionary improvements during this period, making a programmer's task immeasurably easier.

Second, we have learned that the definition of intelligence is elusive. Although computers are playing grandmaster-level chess, does it follow that they have any intelligence? When computers of the future prove mathematical theorems that have stymied the greatest human minds thus far, will they then display intelligence? Or when computers compose music that leaves a Carnegie Hall audience in tears, what then?

Third, we have learned something about learning itself. While there have been many attempts to program machine learning, there have been no great successes to date. Computers have been taught to play chess, but learning how to improve their own play as we do is centuries away.

As computers will remain our partners for the foreseeable future, it is important that we design them in ways that improve our own lives. We need them today to assist us with countless tasks where their abilities exceed our own. We will need them eventually in our quest of outer space. This partnership has just begun, but if the last half-century is any indication of what is to come, as reflected in achievements such as those of Deep Blue, we may be in for many more pleasant surprises.

Monty Newborn serves as chairman of the ACM Computer Chess Committee, a position he has held since the early 1980s. This committee is in charge of officiating the IBM Kasparov Versus Deep Blue Rematch.

Newborn is a professor of computer science at McGill University in Montreal. His chess program, OSTRICH, competed in five world championships dating back to the first in 1974. He served as president of the International Computer Chess Association from 1983 to 1986. His research interests center around computer chess and automated theorem proving.

Newborn has authored five books on computer chess, the latest being Kasparov versus DEEP BLUE: Computer Chess Comes of Age, published by Springer-Verlag of New York.