The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you

[@brownie8090]

I couldn’t win at first but thankfully I had a set of vibrating beads in my carry on, quick trip to the bathroom and back and the chess spoke for itself

[@steviker8413]

😂

[@DashSpiderJumpscares]

People will not let this die

[@SimonaDaRat]

The Niemann gambit

[@firippumartinezu1782]

@@DashSpiderJumpscares You gotta keep the beads charged at all times. Why would you let them die?

[@Synky]

lmfao

[@aquaunknown]

i think delta expected only people like magnus carlsen to aboard their flight and willingly play chess.

[@ericchen3129]

Watch them release Delta (medium) and Delta (hard) next

[@shmslkel6224]

Delta (hard) steals your soul along with beating you in a chess match

[@Lemonpie.]

Delta (medium) will just be Stockfish

[@waltercapa5265]

​@@shmslkel6224it sends you to the shadow realm

[@lirich0]

Delta(hard) will be ChatGPT, making up its own rules to win

[@TrombonePirate]

I'm 1750, got destroyed multiple times. I had one game that felt fairly even going into endgame but I got ground out

[@Aguafy]

Is there a hard difficulty for this bot? I missed him saying it in the video

[@TrombonePirate]

@@Aguafy no, there are no difficulties. You're just vs "the CPU"

[@Aguafy]

@@TrombonePirate that’s brutal 😂😂

[@Michael-yb7jh]

My 1500 self coming into this video thinking I'd have an easy time on this bot 🤯

[@michaelornato3201]

I flew on Delta a few weeks ago. I like chess, and was bored, and decided to play it. That computer crushed me every time. I tried at least a dozen times. And it destroyed me, over and over. I got so frustrated, and decided to watch a movie instead.

[@simontrepel7652]

can confirm and feeling very vindicated

[@createrz8433]

The delta experience

[@yeeitslauren]

you were making content and i was watching schitts creek next to you wow

[@Switzerland_1841]

“martin trades a rook for a bishop to relieve pressure” ☠️

[@wormby3509]

Ok now i want to see an actual gm fight this thing lol

[@kylebroflovski6382]

Pretty sure GothamChess already did a video on this

[@rawtrout007]

Bro thinks he's hikaru 💀

[@josephmazor725]

@@kylebroflovski6382 That wasn't deltas bot I believe

[@its210pm2]

Imagine my surprise when I boarded a 9-hour flight and got my ass kicked by an airplane seat

[@125conman]

SO GLAD SOMEONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS. I will never forget getting my ass beat on a Delta flight a few years ago. When they sent me a survey asking about my flight, I sent them an essay about how BS their chess bot was

[@bigredracingdog466]

My last published USCF rating was about 2000. I found after a while that the Delta program did not like closed positions. I played the Catalan and it opted for the closed variation. If I could keep the pieces on the board I had pretty good success maybe 50%. I lost every game with Black. Overall I'd estimate I was winning 1 in 4 or 5.

[@Jefferson-ly5qe]

This makes me think it's probably just low depth Stockfish. Depth limited SF doesn't need much search at all to reliably find tactics, but struggles in quiet and closed positions. When the position is closed the important moves disappear over the search horizon and the engine can't see far enough to make progress. Often this will cause it to shuffle pieces while the human slowly improves their position. Back when engines were weaker this was a viable anti-computer strategy. There's a crazy game back in 2008 when Nakamura closed up the position against Rybka, exchange sacked both rooks and won.

[@grnarsch5287]

​@@Jefferson-ly5qecould be anything. The main programms all have deep learning what makes them better in closed possitions. But ofc you can limit the engine. Id guess there are almost 1000 engines able to play on this level. But if id had to guess u could be right could be some open source dumed down. Maybe stockfish or leela

[@Jefferson-ly5qe]

@@grnarsch5287 doubt it's Leela, Leela tends to play pretty decent positional chess even at low depth. Also hasn't been around that long. A more traditional brute force engine makes more sense.

[@zigzag321go]

If I remember correctly, Hikaru beat an older version of Stockfish with a similar strategy.

[@psymar]

​@@Jefferson-ly5qeIt's still viable against weaker or older computers. It also sometimes helps to play something offbeat, to get it out of its opening book of sharp lines where most places you can leave theory hand the computer an easy tactic. I struggled to beat the final boss of the Game Boy Advance game Virtual Kasparov until I decided to try Alekhine's Defence, and I had particular success with the admittedly silly Brooklyn Variation (1.e4 Nf6 2.e5 Ng8?!). Yes it's definitely a worse position for Black than when the game started, but not by that much -- White has some work to do to solidify the advantage -- and more importantly, it kept my game boy advance from playing 15 moves of Ruy Lopez theory against me. (Similarly, when I have white, it knows a bunch of Sicilian theory... but if I play 1.b4 I get a relatively easy game.)

[@hag12100]

I remembered being on Delta last year...Wow, no wonder I couldn't win. That's not an easy rating for most players..

[@kylebroflovski6382]

"For most players" is quite the understatement. It could literally mop the floor with 99.999% of chess players.

[@raylopez99]

Airplane inflight engines change in strength when there is a hardware update. I'm 2100 on LiChess and I found Kasparov's engine for his inflight game at the highest level used to be trivial to beat (I literally never lost a game) but when they updated the hardware, as often happens with engines (which increase by 75 Elo points every time hardware speed is doubled, or if you double the time the engine is allowed to think) the Kasparov engine got harder to beat. Since Delta I think has a pretty modern fleet, I would not be surprised if their inflight entertainment hardware is a pretty fast computer. Subscribed!

[@antagonist4823]

You don’t really need a good cpu to run chess engines.

[@rudymeow]

@@antagonist4823 Some old game chess engine use time to determine depth, modern system with same engine would result in some serious depth change.

[@rudymeow]

Let's say the game give easy bot 1 sec think time, it would be really dumb in 20 years old hardware, maybe even a smart untrained kid might win. With modern hardware? it would be a real menace.

[@Doomstryker]

I believe around 80% of the In flight entertainment systems are made by Panasonic Avionics. Delta airlines is one airlines that used Panasonic avionics. However, Chess along with many of the other games are made by a third party.

[@psymar]

​@@antagonist4823You don't need a good computer to run a chess engine that can beat any human, no. But a chess engine designed to play with restrictions which keep it at a human-beatable level, that's suddenly seeing much further and deeper due to being on better hardware, may in fact be much stronger than intended. The same chess engine on NES chessmaster, which it being restricted to 5s per move on NES hardware even I could beat, you run that same code with that same time limit but with the clock speed of a 2024 computer and it probably trounces me.

[@ordinaryrat]

I am around 2050 elo irl, and I got my ass kicked by it. Granted though, it was probably because I wasn't expecting to actually play a decent ai on an airplane.

[@kastapostgard5306]

”The Magnus we have at home” THE SHADE 😂🤣😂

[@robertreid2931]

When the easy mode is competitive with World #2, and one of the finest players to sit at a chess board, I'd hate to see medium mode.

[@jagi7976]

I mean he is pretty cute but I wouldn’t say one of the finest

[@robertreid2931]

@@jagi7976 Empirically false. I'm not even a fan of his, but he's one of a handful of players to ever cross the 2800 barrier, is currently over the 2800, has consistently been a top ten player for over a decade.

[@silly_sheep09]

⁠@@robertreid2931jagi is saying hikaru isn’t that pretty :/

[@robertreid2931]

@@silly_sheep09 That makes his or her comment even worse.

[@kylezo]

@@robertreid2931 big fat whoosh dude. "Fine" is slang for attractive. You're literally arguing that you think hikaru is hot and you don't even realize it lmao.

[@121N60]

I'm so glad to see this video. I repeatedly got crushed by the Delta Bot on easy, and thought it was just me

[@Yoloking1078]

Good to know Delta airlines is creating strategic warlords in the form of chess AI

[@nigerianprince6638]

I played this on a five hour flight once. It has a huge oversight in the fried liver. Took maybe 10 games to find it but after that I won like 8 times

[@nben1843]

same thing with the vienna gambit, it was just losing after 5 moves every game and I can convert that usually.

[@Martineskuelpl]

from evaluation its an easy Bot (GM's version). Made it right on the line between IM and GM

[@TheBcoolGuy]

Like a slightly out-of-shape Levy Rozman.

[@hipparcos]

I do remember getting destroyed by some easy mode chess AI on a flight... Maybe this was it.

[@RobLarsen]

This is great. I was shocked at how tough the "easy" level was. Now I know why!

[@Shaeffen_]

The Delta bot kinda cheats by taking a long time to move (looking up the best possible move) whenever it gets to the middle game

[@darrenlo9802]

If 2000 ELO players barely stand a chance on “easy” mode, then “hard” mode should be a worthy opponent for Stockfish

[@justenoughrandomness8989]

what were they thinking making THIS the "easy" option, was it made with garbage hardware or were the testers gms or what?

[@psymar]

The thing about computers is it's hard to teach them to actually play badly without just making them play moves at random sometimes. The alternative is to just limit how much they get to think, but even looking like 4 ply ahead (two moves for each side) Stockfish probably beats any human under 1600 rating pretty reliably. And if they based it on a timer, and configured that for computers that were put in airplanes 10+ years ago, before delta recently upgraded their fleet, that could easily be 500 elo points improvement from the better hardware

[@justenoughrandomness8989]

@@psymar so the explanation is that it was made with garbage hardware?

[@lily91556]

@@justenoughrandomness8989 seems like the testers probably just weren't good enough at chess to know how hard it truly is and they probably limited the computer's search depth down to like 2 moves and just expected that to be way easier than it actually is

[@justenoughrandomness8989]

@@lily91556 also makes sense

[@LoganHedrick-dn5mn]

I’ve actually used two screens on a flight to pit the easy bot against the hard one. Turns out, there isn’t actually a difference between them

[@doubtingflock1073]

Let's pack people in a confined area and then give them a chess bot they can never beat.

[@henryalexander7325]

Omg yes that thing is ridiculous, I'm 1700 and easy mode kicks my ass every single time

[@dalriada]

Maybe this explains the poor in-flight food and slow boarding times. Delta has put too many resources into its chess bot.

[@Nub_or_something_idk]

ehhh their food is alright after all, nothing is worse than united

[@nben1843]

It was a couple years ago but I beat all the difficulties they offered on Delta as a roughly 1600 rated player at the time, 1800 now. The computer always played a suboptimal line against the vienna gambit, leading to a bunch of games where I just slowly suffocated it.

[@random_silicates]

Praise the algorithm for showing me this, for I too am a victim of the Delta IFE chess game.

[@InterloperBob]

This is crazy. I also just went to Italy on Delta and lost to this bot.

[@Daltonator87]

Dude I’m so glad to see this. I got wrecked every time on two 9-hour flights and only had one close game. The rest I got mated

[@ZDTF]

I remember a levy video about him Getting beaten by the same bot

[@TaylorWeston]

I got 3 wins, 1 draw, 1 loss vs the Delta airlines hardest AI last flight. I'm around 2000 lichess. The wins were all with the Halloween Gambit as white, the draw was an insanely cool long game as black with an Alekhine sideline I'm very fond of, and the loss was a cool game where I was black with a Budapest gambit. I was glad to see it was actually a tough opponent for the most part!

[@davidchopin6583]

No way this is true lol

[@acakeshapedlikeatrainonatable]

@@davidchopin6583 easy medium hard are all the same level apparently

[@frankb.8071]

this is a sick video ngl. just straight to the point. kinda like an mspainexplained video

[@chadricksch]

i’m so glad i found this video, because it has been SO frustrating playing that bot! just like everyone else, even on easy mode, i can’t come close win!!!

[@BlitzShaft]

I have a vendetta against this machine. It plays weird lines, and accepts gambits that it shouldnt

[@josephmazor725]

I'm glad someone tried this because this bot humiliated me and it absolutely wrecked my confidence

[@MeetTheBushes]

I’m so glad I saw this video. I swear Iost my mind during a flight. I thought maybe they had the difficulties reversed, but I got wrecked on every level.

[@trentonmarzano4928]

I believe I was able to draw it after a few attempts, the opening I played gave me a substantial advantage going into the middle game, and after a couple tries was able to get into a pretty easily drawn ending. This was back in 2022, but i still have the game saved. I was around 2100 lichess rating

[@collinf.3873]

Okay I thought I was insane. I am not good at chess but I can beat easy bots on most platforms. This thing absolutely smoked me on my international flight and I thought I was just genuinely horrible at the game lmfao.

[@AverageBishop-]

I might fly with Delta next year and I'm about 2100 online. I'll see what I can do

[@hmartinlb]

Wow, I would have loved that thing. The last flights (european, asian airlines) had (the one? idk how that ecosystem works) bad chess game, where easy to hard was the same difficulty, just with sleep functions added for the "difficult" versions. They were deterministic and always played the same moves given the same sequence. Really easy to beat for me (decent club player).

[@nathanielscreativecollecti6392]

This must be new because I've flown several times for work but haven't traveled since May of this year. Most often I had no problem at all destroying the bots. I am a 1100 Blitz, 1000 rapid player so this surprises me a lot.

[@djwgro]

I actually flew on British Airways not too long ago and the chess bot there was worse than this. It spent quite a bit of time per move and still fell for the fork in the Fried Liver Attack!

[@moldhaker6527]

Thank you for the video. No wonder I was constantly getting crushed on Easy

[@AliAj-h4g]

The World isn’t ready for delta (medium)

[@ZDTF]

6:08 I don't think it's called draw by stalemate. I think it's called draw by 50 move rule

[@animefan7424]

Yeah it’s draw by 50 move rule

[@isavenewspapers8890]

6:52 Wow, Black didn't capture en passant. I see how it is.

[@kadabrium]

holy hell

[@dmytrotsvyntarnyi799]

​@@kadabrium new response just dropped

[@PiercingSight]

I only beat it once and only barely, and then lost twice. And I was being as careful as I could. It has to be at least 2000 ELO.

[@GarrettPetersen]

My one complaint is that you could have started with the middle-ranked bot and used binary search to zero in on Delta's level.

[@kalolewalow]

Great video! By the way, coup de grâce is pronounced "coo day grass" ;)

[@colinarner790]

Even the medium was barely bearable

[@jaylenlenear3944]

dude more chess content this was really well presented !

[@ghostmantagshome-er6pb]

I dig that 3-d looking board.

[@darshanpandit8756]

It appears the name "easy" was given assuming GM magnus (or GM hikaru) would make this video. Travellers not named "GM magnus" or "GM hikaru" are supposed to watch sitcoms. But you happened. You're the glitch in the matrix.

[@sam2725]

Should be noted that chesscom bots are about 400 points overrated compared to players. Hikaru bot would probably be similar to 2400 player. Very tough bot non the less

[@kingworldadventures]

Literally me as a beginner got straight cooked causing me to not play chess for bout 2 years

[@r3nnoc]

I’m sure the programmer that made this is laughing his ass off right now

[@dontich]

My friend in colllege was about 2200 to my 1500. Our games looked like a similar slaughter

[@joeyvigil]

I got crushed by this bot too, I thought I just sucked

[@wilhelmschmidt5420]

Flew delta last week. Won 3 of 6. there are plenty holes in my game.

[@xaviermoise7187]

What's your rating?

[@ZDTF]

Good enough editing and commentary that I'd come back and watch new videos

[@cc3]

the "hard" bot on emirates is probably rated around 800. I guess it's a case of software engineers not really understanding of how good humans are at the game.

[@caseymassar8812]

One of the funny things about the delta bot is that it's super strong but it does blunder every once in a while and it always makes the same moves. Try playing ponziani and you'll see what I mean.

[@shady8045]

I have a bunch of weird frivolous flexes and beating this (on easy mode of course, cause I have low self esteem) is one of them.

[@some1csgo]

there's no such thing as a "50-move-stalemate". Stalemate is a draw but an asymmetrical situation (not in check but no moves for one side).

[@MultiColoredHairBoy]

Huh weird. Last March I played the chess entertainment on an international Delta flight and beat the bot in the first game I played. Maybe they updated their bot?

[@IntegralKing]

little did you know you were playing vs the Navigation computer, and if you kept it up, the nav computer would have put its entire processing power towards playing vs you and accidentally flown the plane to Istanbul or something

[@KowwLol]

I want hikaru to actually play delta so much lol

[@JM-tj5qm]

Delta is probably an old Chess engine, those had a hard time dumbing themselves down compared to the new ones, they brute forced the best move by calculating material loses, so they don't really "understand" the game pretty well, but they are really hard to beat, because usually "easy" just meant the depth they analyze for is lower, but they don't make one move blunders, ever. and if there is a winning combination they are going to find it. Li and all these other chess bots play smarter chess, but purposefully make mistakes to give you can get an advantage. Delta actually WANTS to win.

[@tominmo8865]

Fun content! Like that you invented a tournament like this.

[@EmilParkour]

Wait, how did you do this? Did you download the software that was on the plane? Or how did you get Delta's moves?

[@thechesssavage6400]

2450 is wild for easy mode…

[@Banane1321]

I love the video, but calling Hikaru the „Magnus we got at home“ is kinda disrespectful, he won fischer960 against Magnus, he’s probably the most creative (and second best) player alive right now. Still love the video!

[@91thewatcher23]

I love the constant understatement of mainstream chess. "I'm a chess newbie at only 2200 ELO", Delta labeling this abomination as easy. Bro you are a chess 'newbie' if you have a sub 500 ELO and forget how the knight moves. Come off it. Gives the same vibes as "entry level position, masters degree and 10 years experience reqd."

[@dark6.6E-34]

He didnt say that in the video. Any 2200 would have a field trip against this bot.

[@JT-ds2gn]

This makes me feel better about getting destroyed by the 'easy' bot. I was able to win once as white out of all the games and I decided to stop there lol.

[@ABigLumpofClay]

Don't know if they changed it but I played it couple months ago and beat the 3 star first try

[@LaughingOrange]

So chess on Delta is basically impossible unless you're a GM in business class. I doubt most GMs would beat it in economy, as the environment is a big de-buff compared to a chess tournament.

[@TBone31]

I played on an older delta entertainment screen and the delta medium bot was horrible lol, I won by checkmate in like 30 moves even though my sleep deprived ass blundered a knight and a bishop

[@SamGameSam]

Great content!

[@joemanses]

I think the settings are bugged, I'm rated 1200 and pretty handily beat the normal rated bot

[@chasesawyer-miller3125]

Delta bot on easy crushed me over and over again.

[@BeepirBypr]

the (easy) difficulty is just there to taunt you

[@KappaMan123]

Okay I’m not sure why people if the bot got better from August but the hardest difficulty was not hard at all. I just out calculated it and honestly got bored of winning so frequently.

[@LaughingOrange]

Are you sure you flew with Delta? If so, there might be different engines on different planes due to upgrades to the entertainment system.

[@KappaMan123]

@@LaughingOrange yeah my family only flies with delta. tbf im not a weak player by any means and i have formal training

[@arightscepter]

Say you sack up haw

[@bookle5829]

7:16 AMOGUS LMAOO 😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣

[@rosamgarciagrecia]

Delta (easy) Accuracy: 98.3 💀

[@GrabnarMyers]

I did the hardest mode the only flight I took and I won up like 16 points of material. I thought it was super easy. Either I’m a god or you’re wrong.

[@UmUs]

You could try playing against one of the bots it won against

[@radscorpion8]

fascinating that they only allow you to play easy mode. What could their harder modes be? Maybe you can request that they unlock it

[@theseventhjournal7957]

Don't worry I just beat it

[@ZDTF]

4:04 Most goofy engines have the same problem No opening book But they make up for that fact by calculations Idk how delta didn't see just around 5 moves deep Why did it make such s silly mistake in opening Is it not a calculation bot? Is it an instinct bot like alpha zero? But even alpha zero does some calculations

[@mstefa007]

5 moves deep but 32 pieces that can make many moves. Dump algorithm relies on brute force and just checks few moves deep since there are a lot of possible starting moves

[@ZDTF]

@@mstefa007 but that method is extremely inefficient They stopped doing that a while back Now they have something new called alpha beta pruning It removes dumb moves like Knight Undevelop or knight blunder or anything like that and only keeps useful moves It cuts down the moves it has to see by a lot Like 50 possible moves to 10 possible moves That position probably has even lesser Maybe 5

[@mstefa007]

@@ZDTF I know that, but the way delta chess is playing made me think that. Silly opening moves followed by 2400 level play.

[@ZDTF]

@@mstefa007 I think the computer might just be dumb There's no other reason to explain it

[@gnorts_mr_alien]

surprised they didn't arrest you at the airport for cheating.

[@astronemir]

Bro this one rekt me too

[@thatmetganteacher7776]

why so low sub count :( I subbed

[@staystock8934]

Wait, wasnt that on delta easy mode?

[@ace942]

So it seems that Delta has bad programmers for the chess game since they have no understanding of what "easy" is. They should just delete the app or pay someone to make it play at a very low level.

[@davidchopin6583]

I drew him once

[@Redeulous]

Glad I'm not the only one who noticed this. Easy bot pulled a 6 move sequence to smothered mate me on the queenside before purposefully sacrificing the queen for nothing because it realized it wasn't playing so easy.

[@ZDTF]

7:28 Hey Why no Komodo fight😢