The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

There used to be a chess program in windows 3.1 that would destroy me every time. Not that I was very good, of course! But I think if you just code the known opening books it's not too hard to make a bot that requires a skilled player to beat.

I am so glad this made first page news on HN!!

Years ago I remember flying with Delta and wondering why the delta bot could beat me in a handful of moves on EASY. Absolutely insane.

Someday a delta engineer will go fix the UI bug where the labels for the difficulty levels were inverted in order compared to the enums used by the chess engine.

On the other hand, the poker apps encourage me to consider a career change. I regularly crush the "opposition" with my card-counting skills. World Series of Poker, I am all-in!!! ;-)

United sadly removed games from its in-flight entertainment so I can no longer trounce 6 year old Magnus.

I had similar experiences playing the computer in Tzar: Burden of the Crown. It’s not chess but it is a strategy game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzar%3A_The_Burden_of_the_Crow...

I used to fly a lot of Turkish, and their one's laughably bad. If anyone here works for Turkish Airlines, get yourself a better Chess bot.

I played the bot (probably early 2025) and wasn't that impressed. I won 5-1 or something like it. I did win one or two local chess tournaments in the past but I'm really not an impressive chess player.

The Air Canada bot is too easy on medium but hard is unplayable because the computer is too slow at making each move.

This is great