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The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]

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Re: The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]

#71
post #9

I used to fly a lot of Turkish, and their one's laughably bad. If anyone here works for Turkish Airlines, get yourself a better Chess bot.

Don't be surprised when you learn their so-called "chess bots" are actually people, lying hidden below the floor of the passenger cabin, moving pieces with the help of levers and magnets.

Sounds like a potential Amazon product.

Re: The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]

#72
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best part about this is sneaking a look at your opponents screen if you are lucky enough to sit behind them.

Does this... help with chess?

I think that might have been the joke.

Re: The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]

#73
post #8

Is this really true? I played a few games with it in August. It's not very good. It's one of those old programs where 95% of the moves are pretty strong. But if you just do nothing and sit back it will occasionally make a random blunder and then you grind it out. I figured it's how they were able to weaken a chess engine back in the day; can't adjust the overall strength, so add random blunders. I'm only about 2000 o…

> I figured it's how they were able to weaken a chess engine back in the day; can't adjust the overall strength, so add random blunders.

In tom7’s Elo World, he does this (“dilutes” strong Chess AIs with a certain percentage of random moves) to smooth the gradient since otherwise it would be impossible to evaluate his terrible chess bots against something like Stockfish since they’d just lose every time. https://youtu.be/DpXy041BIlA?si=z7g1a_TX_QoPYN9b

Re: The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]

#74
post #8

Is this really true? I played a few games with it in August. It's not very good. It's one of those old programs where 95% of the moves are pretty strong. But if you just do nothing and sit back it will occasionally make a random blunder and then you grind it out. I figured it's how they were able to weaken a chess engine back in the day; can't adjust the overall strength, so add random blunders. I'm only about 2000 o…

> I'm only about 2000 on lichess

That puts you in the top 7% of players on the site. I have a hard time believing you could get to that rating without knowing that.

Re: The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Reforged was received very poorly so they basically end of life'd the franchise. There is a thriving community with a couple different choices for servers to play on. So I'm sure there's a fix for your mouse speed issue. Check Twitch for people streaming it: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/category/warcraft-iii Grubby, one of the early esports stars, still streams it regularly and hosts his own for fun tourname…

Reforged was received poorly because it was a lazy half assed job that was a blatant cash grab. Not because culturally we have moved on and the game has aged beyond being fun You probably knew this, but wanted to make sure others knew that the reason they ended the franchise is not because there was no market, but instead it was pure unadulterated greed that led to that situation. In an alternate reality they would h…

Sorry for the aside but,

> SOLAR_FIELDS

Panoramic Greetings!

Re: The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]

#77

I wonder if they gave the chess bot X seconds of thinking time in an era when computers were slower? The way you set difficulty for turn based game ai is that you limit how far ahead the algorithm searches. If you set the lookahead based on compute time your difficulties will be way out of line if someone upgrades the CPU.

Something similar happened to the macOS chess game, which has always been bundled with OSX/macOS. Once upon a time it was easy to beat in easy mode, which restricted how long it could thing in advance. When Big Sur rolled out around 2020, Apple introduced a bug which disabled the difficulty slider: no matter what it was set to, it was hard or impossible to beat. In macOS Sequoia, the Chess app got updated again, and…

Heh, I was just discussing this some minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46595777

Re: The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]

#78
post #11
post #8

Is this really true? I played a few games with it in August. It's not very good. It's one of those old programs where 95% of the moves are pretty strong. But if you just do nothing and sit back it will occasionally make a random blunder and then you grind it out. I figured it's how they were able to weaken a chess engine back in the day; can't adjust the overall strength, so add random blunders. I'm only about 2000 o…

My suspicion is that the bot was a fairly standard chess bot, but the difficulties were set based on computation time. As airplane computers got better, it turned into a beast. As a result, if you tried this on older planes, it might have been “easier”

One of my first paid iOS dev jobs was porting a Go game from iPad to iPhone, don't even think the 4 was out yet. It also used computation time based difficulties. By the time I was done writing it, I knew a few tricks I could eke a win out with on 19x19.

When the iPhone 5S came out, I tried it on a whim to check the UI scaling etc... the beginner difficulty on a 9x9 board deleted me. It was grabbing something like 64x more samples per go, the lowest difficulty on the 5S (instant responses) never lost a single game vs the highest difficulty 3GS (15 second turns)

iPhones had a lot of moments like that. Silly bullshit like "what if every pixel was a cell in a collection view" would go from "oh it can barely do 128" to "more responsive than that was, with 2 million" in a few gens.

Re: The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]

#79
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My suspicion is that the bot was a fairly standard chess bot, but the difficulties were set based on computation time. As airplane computers got better, it turned into a beast. As a result, if you tried this on older planes, it might have been “easier”

Chess on M series Macs has the same issue. Even level 1 is easily 2000+ Elo because of the same thing.

AFAIK the only reason Chess even ships at all anymore is as a burn utility. They'll set it to AI vs AI at max difficulty to stress the system and make sure the cooling/power management works.

Re: The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]

#80
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something similar happened to the macOS chess game, which has always been bundled with OSX/macOS. Once upon a time it was easy to beat in easy mode, which restricted how long it could thing in advance. When Big Sur rolled out around 2020, Apple introduced a bug which disabled the difficulty slider: no matter what it was set to, it was hard or impossible to beat. In macOS Sequoia, the Chess app got updated again, and…

is there some reason to implement it as a time limit instead of iterations or something else deterministic? it being affected by CPU speed or machine load seems obvious. or whatever makes sense if “iterations” isn’t a thing, I know nothing about chess algorithms

A time limit is also deterministic in some sense. Level settings used to be mainly time based, because computers at lower settings were no serious competition to decent players, but you don't necessarily want to wait for 30 seconds each move, so there were more casual and more serious levels.

Limiting the search depth is much more deterministic. At lower levels, it has hilarious results, and is pretty good at emulating beginning players (who know the rules, but have a limited skill of calculating moves ahead).

One problem with fixed search depth is that I think most good engines prefer to use dynamic search depth (where they sense that some positions need to be searched a bit deeper to reach a quiescent point), so they will be handicapped with a fix depth.

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