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

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16 pointscjonas3 comments

This must be a more recent version of Delta’s bot than I’ve played against. I’m bad at chess, and I beat the bot a couple times when it decided to march its king out early in the game. But, rather impressively, that’s only when Delta’s bot managed to play legal moves! Most games it would make illegal pawn moves, which pretty much eliminates any concept of Elo rating. “I didn’t think gave you a free rook, but I wasn’t expecting you to take my rook by moving your pawn backwards.”

Anyone got the insider scoop on how the "easy" mode of the delta chess app ended up being a savage?

There was a guess somewhere in the video comments that I found convincing. (I watched the video a few days ago and can no longer find the comment).

It claimed some old chess engines used time limits on certain computations as a means of configuring difficulty. Given more time, the engine may be able to look further ahead.

If such limits were tuned for older hardware, then upgrading the computer could significantly increase the difficulty.

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