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The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]
- JALTU 9mo agoOn 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 9mo agoThis is great
- woopwoop 9mo agoLast 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 9mo agobravo
- johnyzee 9mo agoThe only winning move is not to play.
- lapetitejort 9mo agoHow about a nice trip on a train?
- shermantanktop 9mo agoDepends. How’s the Amtrak chess bot?
- bink 9mo agoUnderfunded and constantly side-tracked by cargo bots.
- chasil 9mo ago...and the Murderbots that have disabled their governor modules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murderbot_Diaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murderbot_Diaries
- runarberg 9mo agoI 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.
- shermantanktop 9mo agoThe 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.
- rmunn 9mo ago
- mrandish 9mo ago> 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.
- bink 9mo agoI swear this happens to me almost every time I fly.
- sejje 9mo agoGorilla glass vs gorilla
- reincarnate0x14 9mo ago(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.
- mabster 9mo agoI flew Scoot airlines recently and my 13” MacBook Air was too big to have on my lap even though the seat in front was not reclined. There's also something about those seats where you get back pain when you try to sleep with your own seat reclined.
- reactordev 9mo agoComfort is an up charge.
- kazinator 9mo agoSome 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.
- kaonwarb 9mo agoThis 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.
- jen20 9mo agoThe thing I really wish domestic airlines would take away is reclining seats in economy. Nothing good comes from having them.
- 15155 9mo agoMost budget carriers are going this way.
- jen20 9mo agoIndeed - I don't generally fly on US low cost carriers, but regularly used to fly on EasyJet in Europe, and the non-reclining seats were just more pleasant for everyone.
- silisili 9mo agoSame. I most recently flew Frontier and despite looking really spartan, it was actually super comfortable. And no reclining to fret over the whole flight.
- QuiEgo 9mo agoI've long enjoyed both Alaska's and Southwest's version of this.
- crystal_revenge 9mo ago> 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.
- OlympusMonds 9mo agoSurely 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.
- crystal_revenge 9mo agoI pointed out exactly the opposite: surely moral action is only possible when one has agency. If an airline needs to force you to be a decent person, then you have no right to claim decency in the first place. People who lean their seats back are assholes. Claiming “but this is permitted!” proves my point. I can’t imagine what a nightmare world it would be if decency were only possible through the exercise of external authority.
- grayfaced 9mo agoAnd yet I'd prefer both myself and the person in front of me lean back. The upright posture is painful for me. Is your preference more valid then mine? The fact that the chairs are configured that way suggests the cultural norm.
- sudokatsu 9mo agoYou have 30 minutes to move your cube
- adityaathalye 9mo ago> getting absolutely crushed into a tiny cube by ... the airplane seat itself Perhaps this is the real reason why they call themselves "Delta".
- eschneider 9mo agoYeah...I know some delta pilots and apparently the inflight computers were sometimes spending more time playing chess than flying the plane...
- jbn 9mo agothis is a beautiful zeugma you have here.
- AnotherGoodName 9mo agoI 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 9mo agoSomething 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 9mo agois 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 9mo agoIt’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.
- tmathmeyer 9mo agoNot 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 9mo agoThere's only one difficulty setting
- dmuino 9mo agoI'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.
- gridspy 9mo agoSounds likely it had an opening book dataset. You just needed a weird opening
- saberience 9mo agoI think you must be talking about something else, the Delta bot in discussion here has about 2500 ELO and basically crushes anyone who isn't a professional chess player.
- ChipopLeMoral 9mo agoIf, as people suggest, the difficulty is time based, it would be easier on older planes.
- markgall 9mo agoIs 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 9mo agoMy 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 9mo agoChess on M series Macs has the same issue. Even level 1 is easily 2000+ Elo because of the same thing.
- hinkley 9mo agoI 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 9mo agoYeah, 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 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.
- specproc 9mo agoI 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.
- tomjakubowski 9mo agoDon'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.
- anematode 9mo agoSounds like a potential Amazon product.
- jibal 9mo agoSounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk (because that's the joke).
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 9mo agoEither you're playing around by extending a joke to the point that I can't follow it, or you forgot to read the first sentence of your own article.
- jibal 9mo agoYour problem is that you have only one comment's worth of context and can't be bothered to read up the thread. The comment was "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." That was a joke about the Mechanical Turk (as a response to "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"), which is why I said that's what it sounds like and provided the link. "Amazon Mechanical Turk" does not involve hidden people moving the pieces with the help of levers and magnets and has nothing to do with chess bots on Turkish airlines. I posted the link because most people aren't familiar with the Mechanical Turk and would not know what @tomjakubowski's joke referred to. I'm sorry if you still can't follow, but your failure to comprehend isn't my fault and I'd rather not be insulted for simply posting an informative link because of someone else's misunderstanding so I'm not going to comment further.
- s3p 9mo agoI 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 9mo agoThere 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 9mo agoI 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.
- cnlwsu 9mo agoSame. I just played it and rocked it and I am a 500 on chess.com. I think this is older version
- hk1337 9mo agoI 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_Crown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzar%3A_The_Burden_of_the_Crow...
- shen 9mo agoThe Air Canada bot is too easy on medium but hard is unplayable because the computer is too slow at making each move.
- ccamrobertson 9mo agoUnited sadly removed games from its in-flight entertainment so I can no longer trounce 6 year old Magnus.
- tromp 9mo agoSometimes 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?
- bdamm 9mo agoSome day we might fly on the same airplane!
- nightpool 9mo agoIt 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
- dheera 9mo agoAren't they all hooked up to Wi-Fi now? Why the restriction on same flight?
- DaSHacka 9mo agoThat'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
- billforsternz 9mo agoI 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.
- tantalor 9mo agoThe best part about this is sneaking a look at your opponents screen if you are lucky enough to sit behind them.
- efitz 9mo agoSomeday 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.
- nomilk 9mo agoThere'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/1Nyov4F7eWbT8uNoeclPY8uXVG6fuyc7y/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Nyov4F7eWbT8uNoeclPY8uXVG6f... [1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eEPBHqE5rpefE9gWflgS_hUwYGSYs6ys/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eEPBHqE5rpefE9gWflgS_hUwYGS...
- teraflop 9mo agoI 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.
- throwaway38294 9mo agoMy guess is they only remove captured pieces on the moved-to square (maybe relying on an implicit capture by overwriting an array entry). This is probably easier than actually tracking pieces that get captured.
- dominicrose 9mo agoThe game is likely in javascript but because of this bug we know it's not using React because with React the programmer doesn't update the view, React does.
- DoctorOW 9mo agoThey're probably using an OSS chess engine in something like C++, but using HTML/CSS/JS for the interface. 90% moves could be represented by a chess board as a 2D array, checking the engine accepts it as a valid move, and then replacing what's on that square be it empty space or a now captured piece. Castling, pawn promotion, and en passant are the edge cases with en passant being the most obscure.
- runarberg 9mo agoIcelandair’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.
- jfaat 9mo agoI 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 https://chessfiend.com
- taftster 9mo agoI'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.
- taftster 9mo agoBut 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.
- jfaat 9mo agoI 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)
- guytv 9mo agoI wanted to check it out. After login I am immediately redirected to a page asking for $80/year without me even understanding what the service does. Unrealistic expectation. Show me value first, ask for money later
- muyuu 9mo agoI 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.
- owenversteeg 9mo agoIn short: it plays far too well (~2500 ELO.) People think it originally played at a reasonable level and accidentally got more powerful as the seatback computers got more powerful; the same thing happened to the Mac chess app with the release of the M1.
- xxs 9mo ago>Mac chess app with the release of the M1. That would be exceptionally sloppy development. Phones have had more than enough power for long enough. 4 core Skylake (Mac 2016) would be well beyond human capabilities, if it's just raw power. The "thinking" (difficult) limit should be considered moves ahead, both depth and count. With a possible limit to time, if there is any time control.
- dominicrose 9mo agoI'm guessing the app got better precisely because there was a time limit.
- epolanski 9mo agoEven a computer from 20+ years ago will comfortably crush Carlsen, it really goes down to the specific engine used, chess engines have evolved a lot during the years. Carlsen knows how to play anti-bot chess where some engines may struggle, but that only applies to amateurish engines.
- s1gsegv 9mo agoYou can code review it for yourself, it’s open source: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/Chess/tree/Chess-570.1 https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/Chess/tree/Chess-... IIRC it does just set a time limit on thinking
- Ajedi32 9mo ago> 4 core Skylake (Mac 2016) would be well beyond human capabilities Not if the computer's time limit is set at 15 microseconds. It's not a question of whether the computers have "enough power"; just whether they are more powerful now than they were previously. And yes, obviously that's a very sloppy and error-prone way to implement a difficulty control.
- YokoZar 9mo agoThis reminds me of a bug I reported in 2007 Ubuntu where the default "easy" chess difficulty was too hard. It was eventually fixed in 2014 by using different chess engines. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-chess/+bug/138570 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-chess/+bug/1... What a world where we have to put significant extra work into making the computer bad enough that a human can compete.
- whazor 9mo agoInside entertainment systems it would be nice if you could select an ELO score to play against, with a slider and persona's (like chess.com has?).
- Hydrus_T 9mo agoI don't understand why this post is getting so much attention. What's so special about this specific chess bot? Developing a 2500 chess.com rating level chess bot is by no means a hard task.