[markgall]

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]

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”

[monster_truck]

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.

[throwaway6977]

Chess on M series Macs has the same issue. Even level 1 is easily 2000+ Elo because of the same thing.

[lurk2]

> 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.

[jibal]

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.

[Uehreka]

> 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

[redox99]

Such a great video.

[sbrother]

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?

[NewsaHackO]

Yeah, he just casually said he had an elo that high, as if that doesn't blow 90% of people out of the water.

[umanwizard]

Note that 2000 on lichess is probably weaker than 2000 on chess.com (or USCF or FIDE)

[Jach]

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.)

[bluedino]

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

[mna_]

What's your name on lichess? Wanna play me?