[HN Gopher] The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2...
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The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]
Author : cjaackie
Score : 107 points
Date : 2026-01-12 19:57 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| JALTU wrote:
| 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!!! ;-)
| lspears wrote:
| This is great
| woopwoop wrote:
| 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.
| nimski wrote:
| bravo
| johnyzee wrote:
| The only winning move is not to play.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| How about a nice trip on a train?
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Depends. How's the Amtrak chess bot?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I don't have 5 days to travel across the country.
| nimih wrote:
| Skill issue, imo.
| mattnewton wrote:
| 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?
| farialima wrote:
| - 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
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I love long distance train journeys, but mainly for
| recreation.
| mrandish wrote:
| > 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.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| 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.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| 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.
| mh2266 wrote:
| 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
| twoodfin wrote:
| 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.
| gowld wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button
| tmathmeyer wrote:
| 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.
| mvkel wrote:
| There's only one difficulty setting
| dmuino wrote:
| 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.
| markgall wrote:
| 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.
| strstr wrote:
| 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"
| throwaway6977 wrote:
| Chess on M series Macs has the same issue. Even level 1 is
| easily 2000+ Elo because of the same thing.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| 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.
| sbrother wrote:
| 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?
| umanwizard wrote:
| Note that 2000 on lichess is probably weaker than 2000 on
| chess.com (or USCF or FIDE)
| dmuino wrote:
| 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.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Yeah, he just casually said he had an elo that high, as if
| that doesn't blow 90% of people out of the water.
| specproc wrote:
| 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.
| s3p wrote:
| 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.
| conartist6 wrote:
| 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.
| gip wrote:
| 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.
| hk1337 wrote:
| 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...
| shen wrote:
| The Air Canada bot is too easy on medium but hard is unplayable
| because the computer is too slow at making each move.
| ccamrobertson wrote:
| United sadly removed games from its in-flight entertainment so I
| can no longer trounce 6 year old Magnus.
| tromp wrote:
| 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?
| nightpool wrote:
| 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
| bdamm wrote:
| Some day we might fly on the same airplane!
| tantalor wrote:
| The best part about this is sneaking a look at your opponents
| screen if you are lucky enough to sit behind them.
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(page generated 2026-01-12 23:00 UTC)