How good is the AI, really?

[mendel]

So I'm decent at chess and am not unfamiliar with various chess variants (I used to play a lot of Extinction Chess and Dark Chess back in the day). 5DCWMTT is not impossible for me to grasp, but I feel like there's still a lot of concepts I need to wrap my head around and I'm flailing.

This is exemplified by me still struggling to intuitively finish the puzzles - I find it difficult to see valid attacks and/or threats clearly in certain puzzles, particularly the combos.

BUT I've played a handful of games against the Balanced (strong) AI now and I have yet to lose. I feel like the AI lets me off pretty easy when it should clearly be trouncing me, but I have no metric to really go off of.

So i ask as a beginner to someone with more experience: is the AI not that good, or am i better at this game than I think? Where is the ceiling for me to advance my skill/knowledge against the AI before I need to start playing against other humans to discover where I truly stand?

[weeweeremover]

Pick a God and pray

[Perseus]

The AI isn't very good.
Although for some reason, i feel like the highest level computer does way better at the "defended pawn" variant if you play as black than any other configuration i've tried. It's also possible i'm just less good at that specific variant.

[fractalgem]

It'll seem very good at first because it can more or less brute force any chance to checkmate it spots (wheras a human can easily miss such an opportunity) but once you start getting used to that you'll learn how it's not very great at strategy.

[CursedPh4nt0m]

As someone with slightly too much playtime against the AI I might be able to give more info on this matter.
First off the AI absolutely *sucks* if you're playing normal Chess against it. In fact, playing with 2 timelines at most almost guarantees your victory as the AI tends to play as if it was actively trying to lose.
To some degree that's certainly due to the changes compared to normal Chess, but I've seen it throw away pieces during my attacks way too often to just accept the nature of the game as an excuse.

Now onto challenging the AI in 5D Chess: It's effectively getting better the more timelines you have. The AI can't play classical Chess, but that is because it's trying to compute a vastly different game and is actually doing a rather decent job at it. More timelines obviously mean more options to work with and the computer naturally is better at assessing all of them and also lasts longer than humans eventually facing exhaustion after playing half a dozen simultaneous games (potentially) interacting with each other.
Even then it's either designed not to be too strong or rather limited tho. In the end I'd have to say that while the play of the AI gets at least more reasonable with more timelines, the true challenge is you continually getting worse at dealing with them.

[mobgabriel]

not good enought to survive the whole game

[HAL9001]

it also just seems to vary a lot in strength between games, I doubt it works exactly like that but it almost feels like it has a randomizer at the start of every game with like a 30% chance to just throw the game, even in the balanced(hard) one which seems to be the strongest