I don't believe the power budget dwarfs a human's, at least not in a measurable way. Resources online suggest that the human brain probably uses about 20 watts. Small laptops don't use much more than that, I don't think, and a small laptop can probably beat any human at chess (since Kramnik lost to a 2006 version of Fritz running on a Core 2 Duo with a crippled tablebase.)

That's an impressive feat, what I remember of the 'deep blue' match was that it was a special purpose rig with thousands of FPGAs wired up with chess specific circuitry.

Iirc the Kramnik match was not exactly a show of strength for Kramnik, also, he is not the current ruling world champion in chess (though he was when he lost that match, but that's why we keep on playing tournaments, the current champion is this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viswanathan_Anand).

That said, Fritz is imo a very impressive piece of software, much more so than deep blue ever was.

edit: I just looked at the wikipedia entry, the 'crippling' was with respect to the end-game tables, typically that's not a really big deal unless you have the bad luck to end in an end game where you need those tables, in that case such a game usually ends in a draw. In none of the games that were played that seems to have made much difference, and Kramnik messing up was what sealed the match.

About the tablebases, I disagree; having a more extensive tablebase means that you can short-circuit calculations earlier in the game (because you immediately know the evaluation if your calculation results in a tablebase position.) So it helps even if you don't actually end up playing into a six-or-less-piece endgame. It's obviously hard to say, but it's certainly conceivable that it hurt Fritz's play in a few of the games which wound up being drawn. I didn't mention it, but another condition of the match greatly favoring Kramnik was that the computer's opening book was completely open to him as well -- he could view all of Fritz's move weightings and statistics during the openings (an attempt at "fairness" given the computer's theoretically more extensive knowledge.)

If you're not aware, Fritz is also no longer at the top of the heap in computer chess. http://www.rybkachess.com/

> About the tablebases, I disagree;

Agreed, thank you for your expansion on this, I had not thought through the consequences.