| ▲ | markgall 8 hours ago |
| 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. |
|
| ▲ | strstr 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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” |
| |
| ▲ | monster_truck 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | throwaway6977 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Chess on M series Macs has the same issue. Even level 1 is easily 2000+ Elo because of the same thing. | | |
| ▲ | microtherion 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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... | |
| ▲ | hinkley 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | jasonwatkinspdx 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | SOLAR_FIELDS 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 | | |
| |
| ▲ | bombcar 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | the_af 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Also, some DOS games were coded so that they ran correctly no matter the speed of the hardware, like Alley Cat :) |
| |
| ▲ | droptablemain 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | usefulcat 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| |
| ▲ | afandian 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think it means gcc -O0 | |
| ▲ | psunavy03 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | Terr_ 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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_af 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
| |
| ▲ | the_af 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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? |
| |
| ▲ | monster_truck 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | microtherion 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
|
| |
| ▲ | 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
|
|
| ▲ | Uehreka 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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 |
| |
|
| ▲ | lurk2 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
| |
| ▲ | jibal 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
|
|
| ▲ | sbrother 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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? |
| |
| ▲ | Jach 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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.) | |
| ▲ | bluedino 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 | |
| ▲ | NewsaHackO 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah, he just casually said he had an elo that high, as if that doesn't blow 90% of people out of the water. | |
| ▲ | umanwizard 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Note that 2000 on lichess is probably weaker than 2000 on chess.com (or USCF or FIDE) | | |
| ▲ | dmuino 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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! | | |
| ▲ | jmb99 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | refulgentis 14 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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 |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | mcmoor 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | citrus1330 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's still significantly stronger than the average online chess player |
|
|
|
| ▲ | 20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] |
| [deleted] |
