Chess, computers, Grandmasters, and voting

At chessgames.com, you can sign up for a free membership, then you can sign up to be a part of a challenge in which you vote for moves against Grandmaster Arno Nickel.

What interested me about this effort is the amazing abundance of people with chess engines on their computers, using them to determine the "proper" move to make at a given time.

I can understand this, say, if you were learning chess and wanted to know the better move to make at some point in a game. But this is an exhibition against a Grandmaster. Why not think through the moves the team should make?

Chess is a game of depth and strategy. Slinging a computer at an opponent who most likely isn't using one seems to ruin the fun, at least for me. I'd rather discuss and develop strategies with other people.

These engines will be left to run for a day or more to find the "perfect" line of moves to make for any given situation. And the people running the engines are convinced that the engine will not steer them wrong.

Recall I said you vote for the move earlier. This leads to everyone who sees the results voting with the engines, and proclaiming anything else would be a mistake. The robotic nature of the chess engine analysis means that there's little to no reason for the human being to be involved at all.

This is the double edged sword of any technology. For some applications, technology can do a superior job. But what of the people? What reason do you have to truly learn chess when a computer can tell you exactly what to do and when?