> then again by the airplane seat itself when the person in front of me reclines their seat.

This reminds me of the time I had my laptop open on the tilt-down tray and the very large man in the seat in front just repositioned his girth (not even reclining the seat) but it flexed the seat back enough that my laptop screen was momentarily caught between the tray below and recessed lip above and was almost crushed.

Some low cost airlines no longer have anything. A small fold-out tray to hold your tablet. There is Wi-Fi to access an intranet with flight information and maybe some entertainment. If you have that, you just load it up with games from your play store.

The only winning move is not to play.

> when the person in front of me reclines their seat.

As a reasonably tall person I have never reclined my seat and will forever consider anyone who does an asshole.

The very fact that you can but don’t do something is the precise space where assholeness is defined.

bravo

I guess it's just a display bug, then? Though it's hard to imagine what kind of bug would lead the game state and the visual representation to get out of sync in that particular way.

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.

Getting more thinking time tends to give surprisingly small improvements to playing strength. For a classical alpha-beta search based engine, for a given ply (turn) you might have ~20 moves to consider each depth of the search tree. If you're trying to brute force search deeper, a 10x increase in compute time or power doesn't even let you search an extra ply.

Elo gains for engines tend to come from better evaluation, better pruning, and better search heuristics. That's not to say that longer search time or a stronger CPU doesn't help, it just doesn't magically make a weak engine into a strong engine.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button

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”

> 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.

> 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

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?

I'm 2100 rapid on lichess, 2050 blitz and bullet. I got destroyed every single time I played the easy mode version on Delta. It knew opening theory. It did not blunder a single time in the middle game. I never made it to an end game.

There's only one difficulty setting

Yes, as someone who is usually flying with my GF, I love this feature! Unfortunately air canada's implementation is abysmal and anytime there is a pilot announcement it interrupts the game long enough to break the network connection and cause it to end the game.

The best part about this is sneaking a look at your opponents screen if you are lucky enough to sit behind them.

It only works with passengers on your same flight. In practice, it's good for kids in the same family or school group who are sitting across the aisle from each other. I've used it for some of their other games

one flight I was on had trivia which allowed multiplayer. We ended up with about 10 playing the game. I thought it was a good idea for a networked computer and captive audience.

Some day we might fly on the same airplane!

Card counting in poker?

Do you mean Blackjack?

I'm going to check this out, as it's legitimately attempting to solve the gap in online chess coaches. As said on the home page, I don't want to know what to play, I want to know why I'm not seeing it or how to think about the move differently. This is the gap and I hope you find success. I'm definitely going to check it out.

But to ask, did you consider "chessfriend" instead of "chessfiend" for branding? "fiend" can carry a negative connotation, which I'm not particularly lining up with in your product.

Don't be surprised when you learn their so-called "chess bots" are actually people, lying hidden below the floor of the passenger cabin, moving pieces with the help of levers and magnets.

Turkish Airlines likes their passengers to feel smart.