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
(I get the joke) Not even gorillas even, the seats on most US carriers are too small and narrow for a lot of adult men even if they're in good shape. I had to sit shoulder to shoulder with one poor guy an entire flight to New Zealand because both of our shoulder widths are wider than the seats and I wanted to make sure my girlfriend had room enough to sleep. We were both good sports about it and were joking about needing a smoke afterwards, but it was not fun unless he wanted to lean halfway out into the aisle. I'm taller than average but not a giant.
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
Opened a laptop on my last flight and this was my immediate and persistent fear
Some low cost airlines no longer have anything. A small fold-out tray to hold your tablet. There is Wi-Fi to access an intranet with flight information and maybe some entertainment. If you have that, you just load it up with games from your play store.
I prefer the Airbus 31x and 32x models without the entertainment systems so much more. On United the Boeing had fucking ads playing NON STOP THE ENTIRE FLIGHT and because I boarded early I'd try to turn off as many around me as possible because somehow the flying public does not mind bright flashing annoying lights in their faces for HOURS.
This is increasingly common in domestic US full-price airlines. It makes sense, in a way - most folks have their own devices, and the airlines save money and weight and don't have to worry about future tech obsolescence - but still makes me a bit sad.
The thing I really wish domestic airlines would take away is reclining seats in economy. Nothing good comes from having them.
> when the person in front of me reclines their seat.
As a reasonably tall person I have never reclined my seat and will forever consider anyone who does an asshole.
The very fact that you can but don’t do something is the precise space where assholeness is defined.
Surely you should blame the airlines, rather than the individuals. They cram more people on, giving you less space - but charge the same - and you get mad at other customers, rather than them for cramming you in.
I personally believe that the ideal situation is in fact everyone reclining their seat
Can I have the 5th element padded roller beds that are disinfected between every use?
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.
...and the Murderbots that have disabled their governor modules.
I think the Amtrak way is to bring a physical chess board and challenge human strangers over a nice cup of coffee in the observation car.
The Puget Sound ferries often have a partially-done jigsaw puzzle on one of the tables. You can't finish it in 30m, so people come and do their part and move on. Eventually someone will put in the last piece, I guess, I've never seen it happen.
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
That's 4 days traveling. Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday. Arriving in the evening doesn't mean you didn't spend that day traveling.
I did this once from Seattle. It was a good experience, but the internet connection was nonexistent along large parts of the route.
Also one way cost like $1,200.
- the internet connection is excellent
I mean, maybe you had a different experience. In my experience in the northeast , the internet service is about as reliable and consistent as the trains themselves (ie not consistent, garbage fire)
If you're not traveling between those specific destinations it can take far, far longer. Amtrak is a joke.
Amtrak is decent on very specific routes and still an absolute joke to anyone who has used trains in Europe, Japan, Taiwan, etc, and no personal experience but I'd imagine China too. My friend takes the Amtrak route up and down the Pacific coast precisely because she's stuck on a train for days and can't be disturbed while doing boring paperwork as an anti-procrastination strategy. Although the observation cars do have great views.
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.
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
boo, it's in the middle of no where along part of the route. Tmobile coverage is mainly in urban areas and along free ways no matter what slingblade tells you on the tv commercial. I don't know if you'd get any coverage on parts of that route other than wired.
Just like how sometimes when you're flying over the rockies or into canada you just don't get internets. There's still middles of no where out there. Often not very far from the freeway.
Even tooling through places like Olympia it seemed to fizzle out
Why not trei a holiday in Sweden this yër? See the loveli lakes.
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?
Can’t bring your work with you?
That sucks.
Skill issue, imo.
bravo
There's a bug in the Delta Air Lines chess program. After cxd6 en passant, the captured pawn isn't removed [0]. White's bishop is then able to check the black king through the pawn (the pawn that should have been removed) [1].
I guess it's just a display bug, then? Though it's hard to imagine what kind of bug would lead the game state and the visual representation to get out of sync in that particular way.
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”
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.
Chess on M series Macs has the same issue. Even level 1 is easily 2000+ Elo because of the same thing.
Oh, this led me down a rabbit hole…
I was maintainer of the Chess app from the early 2000s to about 2015. We first noticed in 2004 that level 1 (which was then "Computer thinks for 1 second per move) was getting stronger with each hardware generation (and in fact stronger than myself).
So we introduced 3 new levels, with the Computer thinking 1, 2, or 3 moves ahead. This solved the problem of the engine getting stronger (though the jump from "3 moves ahead" to "1 second" got worse and worse).
A few years after I had handed off the project, somebody decided to meddle with the level setting code (I was not privy to that decision). The time based levels were entirely replaced with depth based levels (which eliminates the strength inflation problem, but unfortunately was not accompanied by UI changes). But for some reason, parsing of the depth setting was broken as well, so the engine now always plays at depth 40 (stronger than ever).
This should be an easy fix, if Apple gets around to make it (Chess was always a side project for the maintainers). I filed feedback report 21609379.
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.
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
Sorry for the aside but,
> SOLAR_FIELDS
Panoramic Greetings!
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.
Also, some DOS games were coded so that they ran correctly no matter the speed of the hardware, like Alley Cat :)
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.
Interesting. Assuming it did not use DirectDraw -- that's often a major pain point.
I think it means gcc -O0
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...
The original Wing Commander brings back memories! I remember being amazed by the graphics and the story.
These days I cannot stand games with cliched storyline and tend to skip the cutscenes, but back then it all seemed so amazing... like a cross between a movie and a game.
I remember playing it later and running into speed issues too, but usually there was a way to tweak the emulator in order to fix this.
> they didn’t build a timing loop onto the animation
Wow.
1984 (!!!) IBM PC (DOS) port of the game Alley Cat had timings built it. They actually used the system clock if I remember correctly, so it would always run at the correct pace no matter how fast the computer. Last I checked it, decades later, it still ran at the correct speed!
I guess some lessons don't get passed on?
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.
Never heard that one (it may indeed be used that way, but if it were the only reason Apple would probably keep it in the Apple internal parts of their OS installs).
It would also be of limited use, as the engine is purely CPU based; it is single threaded and does not even use SIMD AFAIK, let alone GPU features or the neural engines.
It can't be deleted because it's part of the system tools :)
[deleted]
> 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.
They aren't talking about the site, they're talking about their strength (as measured by that site) so it can be compared to the numbers in the article.
> 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
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?
This was my experience on a long Delta flight, I don't remember if I picked easy or not but it was laughably bad. I took its lunch money for a game and then turned the screen off. I was mostly irritated by the horrible touch interface, it felt so laggy among other issues. (I don't have a ranking, I barely play these days and usually just in person, but my memory says around 1400 back in the yahoo chess days as a teen but it's probably closer to 1000 now.)
I wonder if it's different on different planes? I can easily beat my friend and he won a few games on a flight, I played on a different flight and got crushed for two hours straight. I'm probably 1400-ish
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!
I mean, if you’re in the top 3 percent of anything, yes that’s pretty good, but not unbelievably so, especially in the field of chess. If for instance you randomly put together a classroom full of chess players, there’s decent odds one of them is better than top 3%. Two classrooms and it’s almost a certainty.
Put another way, looking at chess.com users, there are ~6 million people who would count as the top 3 percent. Difficult to achieve, yes, but if 6 million people can achieve it, it’s not really a “humble brag,” it’s just a statement.
I heard it's never intended to be the same since initial rating for Lichess and chess.com respectively is 1500 and 1200. So they should have 300 rating difference on average. Quite fitting with what the other commenter claims actually.
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.
> 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.
The simple thing to do is give it a limit on the total number of states it can explore in its search.
If your goal is consistency, wall-clock time makes no sense. If I run 'make -j20', should the chess computer become vastly easier because the CPU is being used to compile, not search? Should 'nice -n 20 <chess app pid>' make the chess computer worse?
Should my computer thermal-throttling because it's a hot day make the chess computer worse, so chess is harder in winter?
If the goal is consistency, then wall-clock isn't the simple way to do it.
>If the goal is consistency, then wall-clock isn't the simple way to do it.
It’s simpler than doing a limit on number of states, and for some applications consistency isn’t super important.
Doing a time limit also enforces bot moving in a reasonable time. It puts a nice limit to set up a compromise between speed and difficulty.
Doing state limit with a time limit might be better way to do it, but is harder.
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.
Getting more thinking time tends to give surprisingly small improvements to playing strength. For a classical alpha-beta search based engine, for a given ply (turn) you might have ~20 moves to consider each depth of the search tree. If you're trying to brute force search deeper, a 10x increase in compute time or power doesn't even let you search an extra ply.
Elo gains for engines tend to come from better evaluation, better pruning, and better search heuristics. That's not to say that longer search time or a stronger CPU doesn't help, it just doesn't magically make a weak engine into a strong engine.
Alternatively, since there's only one difficulty provided ("easy"), I wondered if the programmer have selected say, DifficultyLevels array index 0 meaning the easiest, but it was actually sorted hardest first.
Naming it the "Turbo" button rather than making "turbo mode" the default and then pressing a button for "slow" mode, IMO, was marketing genius, even though the results are the same.
Blizzard did a similar thing in World of Warcraft during the beta. After playing for a while, your character would get "exhausted" and start earning half experience for killing mobs. The only way to stop being exhausted would be to log off or spend a LONG time in an inn. At some point, they flipped the script. They made the "exhausted" state the default, and while offline or in an inn, you would gain a "rested" experience buffer, where you would earn double experience.
The mechanic worked exactly the same, but by giving it different terms, players felt rewarded for stepping away from the game occasionally, rather than punished for playing too long. They also marketed it as a way of giving players a way to "catch up" after spending a day or two offline.
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
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.
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?
I think that might have been the joke.
you can see the possible moves they're thinking of making
Super fun
Ah, the Zap Brannigan school.
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
I know I'm getting old when I read comments like this. It wouldn't have occurred to me in a million years that it might pair me with passengers on another flight. I'm conditioned by having first experienced this feature probably 30 years or so ago when pairing to passengers on other flights would have been science fiction.
Aren't they all hooked up to Wi-Fi now? Why the restriction on same flight?
That's how the system was originally designed, before in flight WiFi was common. If they're gonna hook it up to the broader internet and allow playing games cross-flight, they might as well just hook it up to an existing service like chess.com and have a significantly larger user base imo
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!
I don't think I've played this bot. I guess the few times I flew in America wasn't with Delta as I would definitely try chess if available.
From what I've seen in the video I'd give the bot around 2100 FIDE equivalent. Granted you don't play bots like you play people. This bot essentially plays top engine moves and every now and then it introduces suboptimal moves. This technique can be played against choosing appropriate openings and being patient with calculation.
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?
Gotta keep track of how many more cards you get in seven card stud.
Do you mean Blackjack?
United sadly removed games from its in-flight entertainment so I can no longer trounce 6 year old Magnus.
I see some chess players so I want to plug the chess coaching app [0] I'm building. I don't know many chess players and could use feedback, but I had been paying for chess.com premium and tried some others and it's always game-level feedback which is insane to me because it's really not that helpful (as evidenced by my abysmal rating.)
I'm running games through stockfish/lc0/Maia and doing some analysis of patterns across multiple games, then feeding that to an agent who can replay through positions and some other fun stuff. Really keen to find out if it's helpful for anyone else!
I'm going to check this out, as it's legitimately attempting to solve the gap in online chess coaches. As said on the home page, I don't want to know what to play, I want to know why I'm not seeing it or how to think about the move differently. This is the gap and I hope you find success. I'm definitely going to check it out.
But to ask, did you consider "chessfriend" instead of "chessfiend" for branding? "fiend" can carry a negative connotation, which I'm not particularly lining up with in your product.
I hadn't considered that name specifically but I'm not married to the branding! I appreciate that feedback and your other comment validating I'm not the only person with this problem. Happy to chat more via email (in bio)
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.
I had similar experiences playing the computer in Tzar: Burden of the Crown. It’s not chess but it is a strategy game.
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.
Turkish Airlines likes their passengers to feel smart.
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.
The Air Canada bot is too easy on medium but hard is unplayable because the computer is too slow at making each move.
Icelandair’s chess engine was equally brutal (well maybe only slightly less brutal). I played a couple of rounds on medium difficulty only to realize I didn’t stand a chance. I played a few more on beginner, and still lost all my game by blundering some tactics to the engine. Just before landing in Iceland I manage to get one game to the endgame, where the bot finally starts feeling like a beginner (well an advanced beginner) and I got one victory in.
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
(I get the joke) Not even gorillas even, the seats on most US carriers are too small and narrow for a lot of adult men even if they're in good shape. I had to sit shoulder to shoulder with one poor guy an entire flight to New Zealand because both of our shoulder widths are wider than the seats and I wanted to make sure my girlfriend had room enough to sleep. We were both good sports about it and were joking about needing a smoke afterwards, but it was not fun unless he wanted to lean halfway out into the aisle. I'm taller than average but not a giant.
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
Opened a laptop on my last flight and this was my immediate and persistent fear
Some low cost airlines no longer have anything. A small fold-out tray to hold your tablet. There is Wi-Fi to access an intranet with flight information and maybe some entertainment. If you have that, you just load it up with games from your play store.
I prefer the Airbus 31x and 32x models without the entertainment systems so much more. On United the Boeing had fucking ads playing NON STOP THE ENTIRE FLIGHT and because I boarded early I'd try to turn off as many around me as possible because somehow the flying public does not mind bright flashing annoying lights in their faces for HOURS.
This is increasingly common in domestic US full-price airlines. It makes sense, in a way - most folks have their own devices, and the airlines save money and weight and don't have to worry about future tech obsolescence - but still makes me a bit sad.
The thing I really wish domestic airlines would take away is reclining seats in economy. Nothing good comes from having them.
> when the person in front of me reclines their seat.
As a reasonably tall person I have never reclined my seat and will forever consider anyone who does an asshole.
The very fact that you can but don’t do something is the precise space where assholeness is defined.
Surely you should blame the airlines, rather than the individuals. They cram more people on, giving you less space - but charge the same - and you get mad at other customers, rather than them for cramming you in.
I personally believe that the ideal situation is in fact everyone reclining their seat
Can I have the 5th element padded roller beds that are disinfected between every use?
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.
...and the Murderbots that have disabled their governor modules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murderbot_Diaries
I think the Amtrak way is to bring a physical chess board and challenge human strangers over a nice cup of coffee in the observation car.
The Puget Sound ferries often have a partially-done jigsaw puzzle on one of the tables. You can't finish it in 30m, so people come and do their part and move on. Eventually someone will put in the last piece, I guess, I've never seen it happen.
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
That's 4 days traveling. Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday. Arriving in the evening doesn't mean you didn't spend that day traveling.
I did this once from Seattle. It was a good experience, but the internet connection was nonexistent along large parts of the route.
Also one way cost like $1,200.
- the internet connection is excellent
I mean, maybe you had a different experience. In my experience in the northeast , the internet service is about as reliable and consistent as the trains themselves (ie not consistent, garbage fire)
If you're not traveling between those specific destinations it can take far, far longer. Amtrak is a joke.
Amtrak is decent on very specific routes and still an absolute joke to anyone who has used trains in Europe, Japan, Taiwan, etc, and no personal experience but I'd imagine China too. My friend takes the Amtrak route up and down the Pacific coast precisely because she's stuck on a train for days and can't be disturbed while doing boring paperwork as an anti-procrastination strategy. Although the observation cars do have great views.
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.
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
boo, it's in the middle of no where along part of the route. Tmobile coverage is mainly in urban areas and along free ways no matter what slingblade tells you on the tv commercial. I don't know if you'd get any coverage on parts of that route other than wired.
Just like how sometimes when you're flying over the rockies or into canada you just don't get internets. There's still middles of no where out there. Often not very far from the freeway.
Even tooling through places like Olympia it seemed to fizzle out
Why not trei a holiday in Sweden this yër? See the loveli lakes.
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?
Can’t bring your work with you?
That sucks.
Skill issue, imo.
bravo
There's a bug in the Delta Air Lines chess program. After cxd6 en passant, the captured pawn isn't removed [0]. White's bishop is then able to check the black king through the pawn (the pawn that should have been removed) [1].
[0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Nyov4F7eWbT8uNoeclPY8uXVG6f...
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eEPBHqE5rpefE9gWflgS_hUwYGS...
I guess it's just a display bug, then? Though it's hard to imagine what kind of bug would lead the game state and the visual representation to get out of sync in that particular way.
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”
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.
Chess on M series Macs has the same issue. Even level 1 is easily 2000+ Elo because of the same thing.
Oh, this led me down a rabbit hole…
I was maintainer of the Chess app from the early 2000s to about 2015. We first noticed in 2004 that level 1 (which was then "Computer thinks for 1 second per move) was getting stronger with each hardware generation (and in fact stronger than myself).
So we introduced 3 new levels, with the Computer thinking 1, 2, or 3 moves ahead. This solved the problem of the engine getting stronger (though the jump from "3 moves ahead" to "1 second" got worse and worse).
A few years after I had handed off the project, somebody decided to meddle with the level setting code (I was not privy to that decision). The time based levels were entirely replaced with depth based levels (which eliminates the strength inflation problem, but unfortunately was not accompanied by UI changes). But for some reason, parsing of the depth setting was broken as well, so the engine now always plays at depth 40 (stronger than ever).
This should be an easy fix, if Apple gets around to make it (Chess was always a side project for the maintainers). I filed feedback report 21609379.
It seems that somebody else had already discovered this and fixed it in a fork of the open source project: https://github.com/aglee/Chess/commit/dfb16b3f32e5a6633d2119...
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
Sorry for the aside but,
> SOLAR_FIELDS
Panoramic Greetings!
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.
Also, some DOS games were coded so that they ran correctly no matter the speed of the hardware, like Alley Cat :)
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.
Interesting. Assuming it did not use DirectDraw -- that's often a major pain point.
I think it means gcc -O0
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...
The original Wing Commander brings back memories! I remember being amazed by the graphics and the story.
These days I cannot stand games with cliched storyline and tend to skip the cutscenes, but back then it all seemed so amazing... like a cross between a movie and a game.
I remember playing it later and running into speed issues too, but usually there was a way to tweak the emulator in order to fix this.
> they didn’t build a timing loop onto the animation
Wow.
1984 (!!!) IBM PC (DOS) port of the game Alley Cat had timings built it. They actually used the system clock if I remember correctly, so it would always run at the correct pace no matter how fast the computer. Last I checked it, decades later, it still ran at the correct speed!
I guess some lessons don't get passed on?
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.
Never heard that one (it may indeed be used that way, but if it were the only reason Apple would probably keep it in the Apple internal parts of their OS installs).
It would also be of limited use, as the engine is purely CPU based; it is single threaded and does not even use SIMD AFAIK, let alone GPU features or the neural engines.
It can't be deleted because it's part of the system tools :)
> 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.
They aren't talking about the site, they're talking about their strength (as measured by that site) so it can be compared to the numbers in the article.
> 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
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?
This was my experience on a long Delta flight, I don't remember if I picked easy or not but it was laughably bad. I took its lunch money for a game and then turned the screen off. I was mostly irritated by the horrible touch interface, it felt so laggy among other issues. (I don't have a ranking, I barely play these days and usually just in person, but my memory says around 1400 back in the yahoo chess days as a teen but it's probably closer to 1000 now.)
I wonder if it's different on different planes? I can easily beat my friend and he won a few games on a flight, I played on a different flight and got crushed for two hours straight. I'm probably 1400-ish
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!
I mean, if you’re in the top 3 percent of anything, yes that’s pretty good, but not unbelievably so, especially in the field of chess. If for instance you randomly put together a classroom full of chess players, there’s decent odds one of them is better than top 3%. Two classrooms and it’s almost a certainty.
Put another way, looking at chess.com users, there are ~6 million people who would count as the top 3 percent. Difficult to achieve, yes, but if 6 million people can achieve it, it’s not really a “humble brag,” it’s just a statement.
I heard it's never intended to be the same since initial rating for Lichess and chess.com respectively is 1500 and 1200. So they should have 300 rating difference on average. Quite fitting with what the other commenter claims actually.
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.
> 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.
The simple thing to do is give it a limit on the total number of states it can explore in its search.
If your goal is consistency, wall-clock time makes no sense. If I run 'make -j20', should the chess computer become vastly easier because the CPU is being used to compile, not search? Should 'nice -n 20 <chess app pid>' make the chess computer worse?
Should my computer thermal-throttling because it's a hot day make the chess computer worse, so chess is harder in winter?
If the goal is consistency, then wall-clock isn't the simple way to do it.
>If the goal is consistency, then wall-clock isn't the simple way to do it.
It’s simpler than doing a limit on number of states, and for some applications consistency isn’t super important.
Doing a time limit also enforces bot moving in a reasonable time. It puts a nice limit to set up a compromise between speed and difficulty.
Doing state limit with a time limit might be better way to do it, but is harder.
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.
Heh, I was just discussing this some minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46595777
Getting more thinking time tends to give surprisingly small improvements to playing strength. For a classical alpha-beta search based engine, for a given ply (turn) you might have ~20 moves to consider each depth of the search tree. If you're trying to brute force search deeper, a 10x increase in compute time or power doesn't even let you search an extra ply.
Elo gains for engines tend to come from better evaluation, better pruning, and better search heuristics. That's not to say that longer search time or a stronger CPU doesn't help, it just doesn't magically make a weak engine into a strong engine.
Alternatively, since there's only one difficulty provided ("easy"), I wondered if the programmer have selected say, DifficultyLevels array index 0 meaning the easiest, but it was actually sorted hardest first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button
Naming it the "Turbo" button rather than making "turbo mode" the default and then pressing a button for "slow" mode, IMO, was marketing genius, even though the results are the same.
Blizzard did a similar thing in World of Warcraft during the beta. After playing for a while, your character would get "exhausted" and start earning half experience for killing mobs. The only way to stop being exhausted would be to log off or spend a LONG time in an inn. At some point, they flipped the script. They made the "exhausted" state the default, and while offline or in an inn, you would gain a "rested" experience buffer, where you would earn double experience.
The mechanic worked exactly the same, but by giving it different terms, players felt rewarded for stepping away from the game occasionally, rather than punished for playing too long. They also marketed it as a way of giving players a way to "catch up" after spending a day or two offline.
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
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.
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?
I think that might have been the joke.
you can see the possible moves they're thinking of making
Super fun
Ah, the Zap Brannigan school.
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
I know I'm getting old when I read comments like this. It wouldn't have occurred to me in a million years that it might pair me with passengers on another flight. I'm conditioned by having first experienced this feature probably 30 years or so ago when pairing to passengers on other flights would have been science fiction.
Aren't they all hooked up to Wi-Fi now? Why the restriction on same flight?
That's how the system was originally designed, before in flight WiFi was common. If they're gonna hook it up to the broader internet and allow playing games cross-flight, they might as well just hook it up to an existing service like chess.com and have a significantly larger user base imo
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!
I don't think I've played this bot. I guess the few times I flew in America wasn't with Delta as I would definitely try chess if available.
From what I've seen in the video I'd give the bot around 2100 FIDE equivalent. Granted you don't play bots like you play people. This bot essentially plays top engine moves and every now and then it introduces suboptimal moves. This technique can be played against choosing appropriate openings and being patient with calculation.
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?
Gotta keep track of how many more cards you get in seven card stud.
Do you mean Blackjack?
United sadly removed games from its in-flight entertainment so I can no longer trounce 6 year old Magnus.
I see some chess players so I want to plug the chess coaching app [0] I'm building. I don't know many chess players and could use feedback, but I had been paying for chess.com premium and tried some others and it's always game-level feedback which is insane to me because it's really not that helpful (as evidenced by my abysmal rating.)
I'm running games through stockfish/lc0/Maia and doing some analysis of patterns across multiple games, then feeding that to an agent who can replay through positions and some other fun stuff. Really keen to find out if it's helpful for anyone else!
[0]https://chessfiend.com
I'm going to check this out, as it's legitimately attempting to solve the gap in online chess coaches. As said on the home page, I don't want to know what to play, I want to know why I'm not seeing it or how to think about the move differently. This is the gap and I hope you find success. I'm definitely going to check it out.
But to ask, did you consider "chessfriend" instead of "chessfiend" for branding? "fiend" can carry a negative connotation, which I'm not particularly lining up with in your product.
I hadn't considered that name specifically but I'm not married to the branding! I appreciate that feedback and your other comment validating I'm not the only person with this problem. Happy to chat more via email (in bio)
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.
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.
Sounds like a potential Amazon product.
Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk (because that's the joke).
Turkish Airlines likes their passengers to feel smart.
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.
The Air Canada bot is too easy on medium but hard is unplayable because the computer is too slow at making each move.
Icelandair’s chess engine was equally brutal (well maybe only slightly less brutal). I played a couple of rounds on medium difficulty only to realize I didn’t stand a chance. I played a few more on beginner, and still lost all my game by blundering some tactics to the engine. Just before landing in Iceland I manage to get one game to the endgame, where the bot finally starts feeling like a beginner (well an advanced beginner) and I got one victory in.
This is great