Brute force has limitations (Score 1)

Chinook, the strongest checkers program currently out there can search deeper than chess programs, because checkers has a smaller branching factor. As this article suggests, the rule of thumb in chess was that benefit from extra lookahead grows linearly. But what was found by the Chinook team, was that it starts to grow linearly, but after a point, that benefit starts to taper off. It's just likely that the tapering point hasn't been reached in chess yet.

So, while 10 move lookahead may give much better results than 5 move lookahead, 25 vs 20 offers much less advantage. This seems to be the case with othello, in my experience, where strong programs can do 24+ midgame searches (where the game is only 60 moves long).

Speaking of Othello, it's interesting to note that right about the same time as the '97 Kasparov-Deep Blue match, the Othello world champion, Takeshi Murakami (and champion again as of 2000), played a 6 game match against the program Logistello. Logistello won that match 6 games to 0.