alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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Nition • yesterday at 11:58 PM
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.
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.