People with Computers Beat Either

Interesting article on chess and computing by Gary Kasparov, who notes that while computers are generally stronger than human players these days, a chess expert using a computer for assistance can easily beat either a computer working alone or a human chess master. And in a major tournament entered by teams of players and computers, the tournament was won, not by the strongest human player or the one with the best computer, but by two American amateurs who had worked out the best way to interact with their machines. As Kasparov puts it,

Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

Figuring out the best way to combine human ingenuity with computer processing power might be the most important technological frontier in the near future.