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Comment by markgall | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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”

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

I 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.

Yeah, 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

Grubby, one of the early esports stars, still streams it regularly and hosts his own for fun tournaments with other streamers.

Reforged was received poorly because it was a lazy half assed job that was a blatant cash grab. Not because culturally we have moved on and the game has aged beyond being fun

You probably knew this, but wanted to make sure others knew that the reason they ended the franchise is not because there was no market, but instead it was pure unadulterated greed that led to that situation. In an alternate reality they would have actually done the remake justice and there would be a lively competitive scene

Sorry for the aside but,

> SOLAR_FIELDS

Panoramic Greetings!

There are various hacks and tools for games (especially DOS games, but for W3 there may exist the same) which delayloop various calls to slow things down enough "to work".

The Dolphin emulator has run into similar things; usually doing things "too fast" just gets you more FPS but sometimes it causes the game to go insane.

Also, some DOS games were coded so that they ran correctly no matter the speed of the hardware, like Alley Cat :)

The original Wing Commander was like that. Playable on 286s/386s, then Pentiums and beyond showed up and it was unplayable. The game started in the "simulator" to show you the controls, and you'd get blown out of space in about 0.5 seconds.

Oh man, I remember that: on a newer computer, I'd tap the left arrow to turn and the Hornet would do a 360.

I suppose, technically, that's one way to make the Scimitar feel more responsive...

The original Wing Commander brings back memories! I remember being amazed by the graphics and the story.

These days I cannot stand games with cliched storyline and tend to skip the cutscenes, but back then it all seemed so amazing... like a cross between a movie and a game.

I remember playing it later and running into speed issues too, but usually there was a way to tweak the emulator in order to fix this.

This is pretty much the experience of trying to play any game from the '90s on modern hardware. It always requires a bit of tinkering and usually a patch from the modding community. Funniest one I've found is Fallout Tactics. The random encounter frequency is somehow tied to clock speed so you'll basically get hit with random encounters during map travel about once every half second.

I've been enjoying Total Annihilation since 1997. Still works fine on fairly modern hardware with Windows 11. No modifications other than some additional maps that I downloaded decades ago.

Interesting. Assuming it did not use DirectDraw -- that's often a major pain point.

I think it means gcc -O0

> they didn’t build a timing loop onto the animation

Wow.

1984 (!!!) IBM PC (DOS) port of the game Alley Cat had timings built it. They actually used the system clock if I remember correctly, so it would always run at the correct pace no matter how fast the computer. Last I checked it, decades later, it still ran at the correct speed!

I guess some lessons don't get passed on?

Sorry if this is a dumb question but did you patch it to the latest version? I don't know if the in-game updater still works but from memory you could download some sort of patch exe file and update it that way.

There's an SC2 custom campaign that reimplements the wc3 campaign that is worth a look.

Oh, this led me down a rabbit hole…

I was maintainer of the Chess app from the early 2000s to about 2015. We first noticed in 2004 that level 1 (which was then "Computer thinks for 1 second per move) was getting stronger with each hardware generation (and in fact stronger than myself).

So we introduced 3 new levels, with the Computer thinking 1, 2, or 3 moves ahead. This solved the problem of the engine getting stronger (though the jump from "3 moves ahead" to "1 second" got worse and worse).

A few years after I had handed off the project, somebody decided to meddle with the level setting code (I was not privy to that decision). The time based levels were entirely replaced with depth based levels (which eliminates the strength inflation problem, but unfortunately was not accompanied by UI changes). But for some reason, parsing of the depth setting was broken as well, so the engine now always plays at depth 40 (stronger than ever).

This should be an easy fix, if Apple gets around to make it (Chess was always a side project for the maintainers). I filed feedback report 21609379.

It seems that somebody else had already discovered this and fixed it in a fork of the open source project: https://github.com/aglee/Chess/commit/dfb16b3f32e5a6633d2119...

AFAIK the only reason Chess even ships at all anymore is as a burn utility. They'll set it to AI vs AI at max difficulty to stress the system and make sure the cooling/power management works.

Never heard that one (it may indeed be used that way, but if it were the only reason Apple would probably keep it in the Apple internal parts of their OS installs).

It would also be of limited use, as the engine is purely CPU based; it is single threaded and does not even use SIMD AFAIK, let alone GPU features or the neural engines.

It can't be deleted because it's part of the system tools :)

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.

One of the minor weird things about iOS development early on was just how fast the transition was from the simulator being dramatically faster than actual devices to the simulator being slower than devices. When I started out you’d get things working nicely in the simulator and then discover it’s an order of magnitude too slow on a phone. Just a few years later and my phone was faster than my laptop until thermal throttling kicked in.

> 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.

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.

> 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

Such a great video.

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?

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

That's true, I'm 2050-2100 lichess, around 1800 on chess.com. Never played a rated tournament but played some rated players who were 1400-1500 rated USCF, and they were roughly my strength, maybe a bit better. Still the Delta bot, easy mode, was much, much better than me.

Casually just in the top 2-3 percent of chess players globally world wide humble brag. I'm not that good at it, just a little bit!

I mean, if you’re in the top 3 percent of anything, yes that’s pretty good, but not unbelievably so, especially in the field of chess. If for instance you randomly put together a classroom full of chess players, there’s decent odds one of them is better than top 3%. Two classrooms and it’s almost a certainty.

Put another way, looking at chess.com users, there are ~6 million people who would count as the top 3 percent. Difficult to achieve, yes, but if 6 million people can achieve it, it’s not really a “humble brag,” it’s just a statement.

It made me smile to hear “I’m only 97th percentile” isn’t a humblebrag. You may be employing an old saw of mine, you can make people* react however you want by leaning on either percentages or whole numbers when you shouldn’t.

* who don’t have strong numeracy and time to think

I think it depends on the pool to which you're comparing. Being top 2% of all programmers is not so impressive if you include everyone who's ever taken an Intro class. Top 2% of people who do it for a living is much more significant.

I'm in a similar boat as the other posters (2050-2100 lichess, 1400 USCF). The median active rating for USCF is around 1200 and likely much higher if you don't include scholastic players, so if we compare against the OTB pool, "2000 lichess" is probably closer to top 50% than 2%

It's still significantly stronger than the average online chess player

I heard it's never intended to be the same since initial rating for Lichess and chess.com respectively is 1500 and 1200. So they should have 300 rating difference on average. Quite fitting with what the other commenter claims actually.

I don’t think it would average out to a 300 elo difference simply based on the starting rating being 300 apart.

If everything else was the same, and people play enough games they will average out to the same elo.

The difference is caused by many factors. People don’t play enough games to sink to their real elo, the player pool is different, and you gain/lose fewer points per game with Lichess’s elo algorithm.

ELO is relative. There's no reason why a GM ELO should be 2800 or 280 or 28000. So it's all decided by ELO of every other person. So if the ELO gain/loss calculation and audience of Lichess and chess.com are exactly the same, because of different starting position, I don't think they'd converge to the same ELO but instead will differ by starting position difference.

Also I can't really prove it mathematically but I guess average ELO would also hover on the starting ELO. Because I can't see why it would hover anywhere else and any ELO gained would be lost by someone else.

On further thought yes, I think you're correct.

When I started playing I believe chess.com let you select whether you’re beginner, intermediate or advanced and your start elo was based on that. Could be wrong, and it could’ve changed since.

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

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

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.)

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

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