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.
> then again by the airplane seat itself when the person in front of me reclines their seat.
This reminds me of the time I had my laptop open on the tilt-down tray and the very large man in the seat in front just repositioned his girth (not even reclining the seat) but it flexed the seat back enough that my laptop screen was momentarily caught between the tray below and recessed lip above and was almost crushed.
I was rather disappointed by the internet connection on the Cascades line (going Seattle --> Portland and back). As far as I could tell, they use T-Mobile for backhaul. Who are headquartered in Seattle. Yet the connection barely seemed to work for about half of the journey
Let’s be realistic. I love long distance train journeys, but mainly for recreation. Being on a train for 3-5 days is pretty exhausting no matter how comfortable. I’ve done the 30 day Amtrak pass before and it was fantastic but I wouldn’t be looking forward to that if it was a work trip where I want to fly in and then get back to my family as fast as possible. There’s no way that can compare to a 5-6 hour flight+2 hours at the airport.
This wouldn’t bother me as much but it’s really like 5-7 days depending on freight use of the lines and they can’t tell you ahead of time what it’s going to be somehow?
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.
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”
I found a used copy of Warcraft 3 at the store about ten years after it came out, proudly brought it home, fired it up and didn’t recall the graphics being quite that awful, but the first time I tried to scroll the map sideways it shot to the far end because they didn’t build a timing loop onto the animation and I shut it down, disappointed.
Unfortunately they never released a remastered version of it. They seem to have made some clone of it called “reforged” whatever the fuck that means.
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 have actually done the remake justice and there would be a lively competitive scene
There are various hacks and tools for games (especially DOS games, but for W3 there may exist the same) which delayloop various calls to slow things down enough "to work".
The Dolphin emulator has run into similar things; usually doing things "too fast" just gets you more FPS but sometimes it causes the game to go insane.
This is pretty much the experience of trying to play any game from the '90s on modern hardware. It always requires a bit of tinkering and usually a patch from the modding community. Funniest one I've found is Fallout Tactics. The random encounter frequency is somehow tied to clock speed so you'll basically get hit with random encounters during map travel about once every half second.
I've been enjoying Total Annihilation since 1997. Still works fine on fairly modern hardware with Windows 11. No modifications other than some additional maps that I downloaded decades ago.
The original Wing Commander was like that. Playable on 286s/386s, then Pentiums and beyond showed up and it was unplayable. The game started in the "simulator" to show you the controls, and you'd get blown out of space in about 0.5 seconds.
2. I played a chess bot on Delta on easy and it was really bad, felt like random moves. I beat it trivially and I am actually bad at chess, ~1000 on chess.com. I wonder if this one is different?
That's true, I'm 2050-2100 lichess, around 1800 on chess.com. Never played a rated tournament but played some rated players who were 1400-1500 rated USCF, and they were roughly my strength, maybe a bit better. Still the Delta bot, easy mode, was much, much better than me.
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.
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
It’s simpler. Chess is a search through the space of possible moves, looking for a move that’s estimated to be better than the best move you’ve seen so far.
The search is by depth of further moves, and “better” is a function of heuristics (explicit or learned) on the resulting board positions, because most of the time you can’t be sure a move will inevitably result in a win or a loss.
So any particular move evaluation might take more or less time before the algorithm gives up on it—or chooses it as the new winner. To throw a consistent amount of compute at each move, the simple thing to do is give the engine consistent amounts of time per move.
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.
I'm 2100 rapid on lichess, 2050 blitz and bullet. I got destroyed every single time I played the easy mode version on Delta. It knew opening theory. It did not blunder a single time in the middle game. I never made it to an end game.
Sometimes the airlines chess app gives you the option to play another passenger, but even after waiting for half an hour I've never been hooked up with another player. Has anyone else been able to?
Yes, as someone who is usually flying with my GF, I love this feature! Unfortunately air canada's implementation is abysmal and anytime there is a pilot announcement it interrupts the game long enough to break the network connection and cause it to end the game.
It only works with passengers on your same flight. In practice, it's good for kids in the same family or school group who are sitting across the aisle from each other. I've used it for some of their other games
one flight I was on had trivia which allowed multiplayer. We ended up with about 10 playing the game. I thought it was a good idea for a networked computer and captive audience.
There used to be a chess program in windows 3.1 that would destroy me every time. Not that I was very good, of course! But I think if you just code the known opening books it's not too hard to make a bot that requires a skilled player to beat.
Someday a delta engineer will go fix the UI bug where the labels for the difficulty levels were inverted in order compared to the enums used by the chess engine.
On the other hand, the poker apps encourage me to consider a career change. I regularly crush the "opposition" with my card-counting skills. World Series of Poker, I am all-in!!! ;-)
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.
I played the bot (probably early 2025) and wasn't that impressed. I won 5-1 or something like it. I did win one or two local chess tournaments in the past but I'm really not an impressive chess player.
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.
> then again by the airplane seat itself when the person in front of me reclines their seat.
This reminds me of the time I had my laptop open on the tilt-down tray and the very large man in the seat in front just repositioned his girth (not even reclining the seat) but it flexed the seat back enough that my laptop screen was momentarily caught between the tray below and recessed lip above and was almost crushed.
Gorilla glass vs gorilla
Opened a laptop on my last flight and this was my immediate and persistent fear
I swear this happens to me almost every time I fly.
now you know to check who's sitting in front of you. rookie mistake
The only winning move is not to play.
How about a nice trip on a train?
Depends. How’s the Amtrak chess bot?
Underfunded and constantly side-tracked by cargo bots.
I don’t have 5 days to travel across the country.
- it’s 3 days not 5 (e.g leaving NYC Wednesday morning arriving SF Saturday evening)
- the internet connection is excellent (even in most tunnels) so you can work, have video meetings, etc, not to mention play chess online
I was rather disappointed by the internet connection on the Cascades line (going Seattle --> Portland and back). As far as I could tell, they use T-Mobile for backhaul. Who are headquartered in Seattle. Yet the connection barely seemed to work for about half of the journey
That's 4 days traveling. Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday. Arriving in the evening doesn't mean you didn't spend that day traveling.
Let’s be realistic. I love long distance train journeys, but mainly for recreation. Being on a train for 3-5 days is pretty exhausting no matter how comfortable. I’ve done the 30 day Amtrak pass before and it was fantastic but I wouldn’t be looking forward to that if it was a work trip where I want to fly in and then get back to my family as fast as possible. There’s no way that can compare to a 5-6 hour flight+2 hours at the airport.
This wouldn’t bother me as much but it’s really like 5-7 days depending on freight use of the lines and they can’t tell you ahead of time what it’s going to be somehow?
Why not trei a holiday in Sweden this yër? See the loveli lakes.
Skill issue, imo.
bravo
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.
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.
I found a used copy of Warcraft 3 at the store about ten years after it came out, proudly brought it home, fired it up and didn’t recall the graphics being quite that awful, but the first time I tried to scroll the map sideways it shot to the far end because they didn’t build a timing loop onto the animation and I shut it down, disappointed.
Unfortunately they never released a remastered version of it. They seem to have made some clone of it called “reforged” whatever the fuck that means.
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 tournaments with other streamers.
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 have actually done the remake justice and there would be a lively competitive scene
There are various hacks and tools for games (especially DOS games, but for W3 there may exist the same) which delayloop various calls to slow things down enough "to work".
The Dolphin emulator has run into similar things; usually doing things "too fast" just gets you more FPS but sometimes it causes the game to go insane.
I think it means gcc -O0
This is pretty much the experience of trying to play any game from the '90s on modern hardware. It always requires a bit of tinkering and usually a patch from the modding community. Funniest one I've found is Fallout Tactics. The random encounter frequency is somehow tied to clock speed so you'll basically get hit with random encounters during map travel about once every half second.
I've been enjoying Total Annihilation since 1997. Still works fine on fairly modern hardware with Windows 11. No modifications other than some additional maps that I downloaded decades ago.
The original Wing Commander was like that. Playable on 286s/386s, then Pentiums and beyond showed up and it was unplayable. The game started in the "simulator" to show you the controls, and you'd get blown out of space in about 0.5 seconds.
Oh man, I remember that: on a newer computer, I'd tap the left arrow to turn and the Hornet would do a 360.
I suppose, technically, that's one way to make the Scimitar feel more responsive...
1. Uh, isn't 2000 like extremely fucking good?
2. I played a chess bot on Delta on easy and it was really bad, felt like random moves. I beat it trivially and I am actually bad at chess, ~1000 on chess.com. I wonder if this one is different?
Yeah, he just casually said he had an elo that high, as if that doesn't blow 90% of people out of the water.
Note that 2000 on lichess is probably weaker than 2000 on chess.com (or USCF or FIDE)
That's true, I'm 2050-2100 lichess, around 1800 on chess.com. Never played a rated tournament but played some rated players who were 1400-1500 rated USCF, and they were roughly my strength, maybe a bit better. Still the Delta bot, easy mode, was much, much better than me.
Casually just in the top 2-3 percent of chess players globally world wide humble brag. I'm not that good at it, just a little bit!
It's still significantly stronger than the average online chess player
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.
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
It’s simpler. Chess is a search through the space of possible moves, looking for a move that’s estimated to be better than the best move you’ve seen so far.
The search is by depth of further moves, and “better” is a function of heuristics (explicit or learned) on the resulting board positions, because most of the time you can’t be sure a move will inevitably result in a win or a loss.
So any particular move evaluation might take more or less time before the algorithm gives up on it—or chooses it as the new winner. To throw a consistent amount of compute at each move, the simple thing to do is give the engine consistent amounts of time per move.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button
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.
I'm 2100 rapid on lichess, 2050 blitz and bullet. I got destroyed every single time I played the easy mode version on Delta. It knew opening theory. It did not blunder a single time in the middle game. I never made it to an end game.
There's only one difficulty setting
Sometimes the airlines chess app gives you the option to play another passenger, but even after waiting for half an hour I've never been hooked up with another player. Has anyone else been able to?
Yes, as someone who is usually flying with my GF, I love this feature! Unfortunately air canada's implementation is abysmal and anytime there is a pilot announcement it interrupts the game long enough to break the network connection and cause it to end the game.
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?
you can see the possible moves they're thinking of making
It only works with passengers on your same flight. In practice, it's good for kids in the same family or school group who are sitting across the aisle from each other. I've used it for some of their other games
one flight I was on had trivia which allowed multiplayer. We ended up with about 10 playing the game. I thought it was a good idea for a networked computer and captive audience.
Some day we might fly on the same airplane!
There used to be a chess program in windows 3.1 that would destroy me every time. Not that I was very good, of course! But I think if you just code the known opening books it's not too hard to make a bot that requires a skilled player to beat.
I am so glad this made first page news on HN!!
Years ago I remember flying with Delta and wondering why the delta bot could beat me in a handful of moves on EASY. Absolutely insane.
Someday a delta engineer will go fix the UI bug where the labels for the difficulty levels were inverted in order compared to the enums used by the chess engine.
On the other hand, the poker apps encourage me to consider a career change. I regularly crush the "opposition" with my card-counting skills. World Series of Poker, I am all-in!!! ;-)
Card counting in poker?
United sadly removed games from its in-flight entertainment so I can no longer trounce 6 year old Magnus.
I had similar experiences playing the computer in Tzar: Burden of the Crown. It’s not chess but it is a strategy game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzar%3A_The_Burden_of_the_Crow...
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.
I played the bot (probably early 2025) and wasn't that impressed. I won 5-1 or something like it. I did win one or two local chess tournaments in the past but I'm really not an impressive chess player.
The Air Canada bot is too easy on medium but hard is unplayable because the computer is too slow at making each move.
This is great