2003 was hailed as the starting point of a new era in chess competition. Never before has an official chess body endorsed a computer program.
In January 2003 this happened for the first time: The world's then best player, Gary Kasparov, competed against the world best chess software: Deep Junior".
Although Kasparov played against "Deep Blue" already in 1997 and Victor Kramnik played against "Deep Fritz" in Oct 2002, the January 2003 competition was the first endorsed by the world chess federation.

Gary Kasparov hailed even today as the best chess player the world has ever seen, and the first player to challenge a machine in 1997. Kasparov began playing at age 5, was crowned an international grandmaster at age 17 and world champion at 21, a title he held for 15 years until losing it to Kramnik in 2000.
Deep Junior (Version 7) is an aggressive chess program with human like playing style. It was developed by Tel Aviv programmers Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky, with the assistance of grandmaster Boris Alterman. A 50$ version for ordinary PC's is available on the market.

Although computer chess has a long history, a non human competitor was never before accepted into official tournaments. Experts were hoping that this game would be a breakthrough for computers to compete even in the chess Olympics.
The tournament included 6 games and was played in the New York Athletic club in a two week period from Jan 26 to Feb. 7th 2003 after many delays. Each game was not longer than 7 hours. This was the first public game for Kasparov against a computer in 6 years. The game was endorsed by both FIDE and ICGA.

In 1997 IBM's program "Deep Blue" beat Kasparov in a highly publicized (yet unofficial) tournament. The chess master wanted to prove that was a one time fluke.
Deep Junior, the reighning computer chess champion from 2000 to 2003 and its developers wanted to prove this is not so.
With the exception of a clear win for Kasparov on the first game, the tournament continued neck to neck and ended with a 3:3 tie.

In 2006 FIDE chess ranking Kasparov is still no. 1 with 2812 points. He announced his retirement from chess in 2005 and thus has been recently removed from the ranks due to inactivity.
Junior 10n is the most recent version of the computer software that is famous for risk taking and human like moves. What has started with the famous sacrifice of a bishop on h2 against Kasparov has been fine tuned and what once may have looked like a speculative move is looking sound and efficient in Junior 10.