Chess computer programs

I find it interesting, so I created a thread for this. Some one ask how inteligent computer chess programs are. Below are the answer of chess programmers..

I have also written a chess engine once, and it was the heaviest project i have ever done. So heavy that i had to give it up. Machines can do nothing if they are not programmed by a smart programmer. After 7 half moves look ahead we reach already the limit of several seconds look ahead, so there need to be a lot more tricks than simply looking a few moves ahead.

The next step is alpha beta pruning in the look ahead. But even that takes you nowhere if you do not use tricks like the killer moves heuristic etc ...
It is easy to make a simple chess program but to make it play really smart is an overwhelming task, which needs strategic ability's of the programmer.
So the machine isn't intelligent by no means. I think the programmer needs to be good in chess too by preference. Anyway, i tried it and i failed to make a program that plays really smart. I think there needs to be chess experience and intelligence included by the programmer.
So it is the programmer that is intelligent when the game is good, not the machine.
Like the other answerer said, it is this speed that makes a computer have the ability to look deeper (more moves ahead) than a human player. But even a computer cannot look deeper than 7 HALF moves if it needs to answer quickly and check all the possibility's. Still some programs look 20 moves and more deep in some directions. The art is choosing the right moves to look deeper : killer moves and moves where material is exchanged or the king is threatened. Using a lot of memory can be useful too in having a transposition table (different series of moves can lead to the same chess position and these need to be evaluated only once if the result of the evaluation is kept in this table).
So the computer can use it's speed, but also it's large and precise memory.