# 1750's Baron of Kempelen's TURK
# 1950 Alan Turing does LMG
# 1950 Claude Shannon paper design
# 1957 Herb Simon Predicts 10 Years
# 1968 David Levy bets nothing to beat him in 10 years
# 1978 Levy Wins bet
# 1982 Bell Lab's BELLE
# 1988 CMU Deep Thought
* Levy Loses
# 1997 IBM Deep blue defeats Kasparov
taken from
http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~pollack/...es/games19.htm
Building a chess "machine" that can defeate a human has been attempted, as you can see, from as early as 1750. As mentioned before, there are fully customizable settings in most modern chess simulators, and the fact that the chessmaster is whooping your "behind" (as it is mine) should tell you not that it is too hard, but that you need more practice.
personally I like the thought that I have an opponent whenever I want , and no one ever has to know how much it kicks my "behind". This way I can get used to losing so I don't totally lose it when it happens in public :P
Another good thing about the chessmaster series is that they are fully supported online, and you can get ranked officially through it.