LONDON — It was Game 8 of the World Chess Championship, and the four-time winner and defending champion, 42-year-old Viswanathan Anand of India, playing white, was a game down to the Israeli Boris Gelfand, 43. Gelfand, perhaps buoyed by his success in Game 7, had chosen an unexpectedly sharp line against Anand, who is renowned for his ability to calculate quickly on the board.

The screen of Deep Junior, the computer that the chess champion Gary Kasparov faced in 2003. Chip East/Reuters The screen of Deep Junior, the computer that the chess champion Gary Kasparov faced in 2003. Commenting live, the Hungarian grandmaster Peter Leko, a challenger for the world title in 2005, preferred Gelfand’s position. But just as he was expressing surprise at Anand’s strategy, Anand’s 17th move brought the game to a sudden close. Anand had deceived both his challenger and one of the strongest players in the world.

But many lesser players watching the game live with specialized computer chess engines weren’t flummoxed by Anand’s play; programs like Houdini had flagged Anand’s trap a few moves earlier. Computers have so flattened the game of chess that even novices like me can make some sense of the moves being played at the highest level.

Grandmasters of comparable skill now come to championship games with computer-generated analysis of their opponents’ opening lines and likely moves. Home preparation has always been important, but computers have made it much more so and have thereby changed the nature of the game. Now risky plays are almost inevitably punished because they’ve been anticipated, making Anand’s play in Game 8 of the recent championship a rare exception.

Computers don’t play chess perfectly — the game is far too complicated for that — but they play in a way that’s more exciting and more decisive. They also play better than humans. Which is why since chess is no longer about just two humans facing each other anyway — thanks to pre-game computer-assisted preparation — it makes sense to allow the use of computers during competitive games. (Of course, for the sake of fairness, the two players would have equal access to the same computer engine.) This idea, known as “advanced chess,” has been endorsed by the former chess champion Gary Kasparov.

So far, experiments with advanced chess suggest that the powers of man and machine combined don’t just make for a stronger game than a man’s alone; they also seem to make for a stronger game than a machine’s alone. Allowing chess players the assistance of the best computer chess engine available during top tournaments would ensure that the contests really do showcase the very best chess being played on earth.

It would also teach us important things about the world.

Take, for example, a game that’s winding down with this particular configuration: rook and a bishop versus two knights. This situation came up in a world championship qualifying game in 2007, and the match concluded in a draw. But computer analysis showed that the game was really a forced win for black in 208 moves. This revealed not just a strategic truth about chess, but also a phenomenological truth, a truth about reality, that would otherwise have remained inaccessible.

Computers have made possible a famous proof in mathematics — the four-color theorem — but most mathematicians continue to hope the proof can be found without the assistance of computers. With chess, though, some truths are simply unknowable without a computer. As computers get better at chess, letting the best chess players work with them more would give us a better understanding of the game, our own limits and the world.