Live data from Hacker News

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

youtube.com

1–10 of 352 posts

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

#4
Last time I flew Delta they no longer had this bot, which made me sad. One of my favorite parts of flying was getting absolutely crushed into a tiny cube by the airplane seat's easy chess bot, and then again by the airplane seat itself when the person in front of me reclines their seat.

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

#5
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.

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

#6
post #4

Last time I flew Delta they no longer had this bot, which made me sad. One of my favorite parts of flying was getting absolutely crushed into a tiny cube by the airplane seat's easy chess bot, and then again by the airplane seat itself when the person in front of me reclines their seat.

bravo

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

#7
Not only is the delta chessbot bad (My low 1600s lichess-elo self can win handily every single time against any difficulty, white or black), but there's also a sequence of moves I found which deterministically causes the game to crash. I should probably record it next time I'm on a flight.

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

#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 on lichess but I beat it pretty much every time, especially once I realized there is no reason to try anything sharp.

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

#10

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 supposedly they fixed the difficulty slider, but in the interval silicon improved so much that the old restraints (like think for only a second) mean little. The lowest levels play like a grand master.

Post reply on HN