If computers continue to improve as they have been, how long will it take for three orders of magnitude to be made up? 15 years? I imagine as computers get better, people and computers will also find better ways to solve problems further lowering the time it takes to solve Chess and simular games. Why can't a current Chess playing machine have the pieces set up for each position of FRC and work out a book for them? Imagine computers that work a 1000 times faster than the current models, or have chips with parallel processing, or a bunch of people all sharing their computers.

That link you sent me to is full of wishfull thinking. There's not a chance that computer makers are going to stop trying to improve their machines! Arms race, indeed it is. You might be able to organize a tournament where you set limits for the computers, but such a thing will get left way behind the actual developement of computers. It goes against human nature. We always want the best, so who's going to be interested in a bunch of limited computers playing Chess at our level when it can be played at a higher level?. In a just a couple of years computers will play Chess better than even the best human player. There won't be a doubt in anyone's mind about it like there is today. This is one of the reasons for the growing popularity of the larger Chess variants. Just a slight increase in the board and the addition of a couple new pieces doesn't make it much harder for a person to understand or play the game, but it greatly increases how much computing has to be done to play it. Chess's popularity and newsworthiness might drop when this happens, but I imagine the computers will then play against each other and the prizes might go up for that. Kind of like that show called "Battle-Bots" except it'll be Chess that they'll be playing. There already are Chess tournaments for computers, right? Perhaps one reason people don't care so much about them is that there's still a few people that play better than them. Do they let the computers enter regular human type Chess champion tournaments?