2025 Mazda MX-5 Miata 'got absolutely wrecked' by Inflatable Boat in beginner's boat racing match — Mazda's newest model bamboozled by 1930s technology.
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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An LLM is a poor computational/predictive paradigm for playing chess.
This just in: a hammer makes a poor screwdriver.
LLMs are more like a leaf blower though
Actually, a very specific model (chatgpt3.5-turbo-instruct) was pretty good at chess (around 1700 elo if i remember correctly).
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The underlying neural network tech is the same as what the best chess AIs (AlphaZero, Leela) use. The problem is, as you said, that ChatGPT is designed specifically as an LLM so it’s been optimized strictly to write semi-coherent text first, and then any problem solving beyond that is ancillary. Which should say a lot about how inconsistent ChatGPT is at solving problems, given that it’s not actually optimized for any specific use cases.
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If you don't play chess, the Atari is probably going to beat you as well.
LLMs are only good at things to the extent that they have been well-trained in the relevant areas. Not just learning to predict text string sequences, but reinforcement learning after that, where a human or some other agent says "this answer is better than that one" enough times in enough of the right contexts. It mimics the way humans learn, which is through repeated and diverse exposure.
If they set up a system to train it against some chess program, or (much simpler) simply gave it a tool call, it would do much better. Tool calling already exists and would be by far the easiest way.
It could also be instructed to write a chess solver program and then run it, at which point it would be on par with the Atari, but it wouldn't compete well with a serious chess solver.
Did the author thinks ChatGPT is in fact an AGI? It's a chatbot. Why would it be good at chess? It's like saying an Atari 2600 running a dedicated chess program can beat Google Maps at chess.
AI including ChatGPT is being marketed as super awesome at everything, which is why that and similar AI is being forced into absolutely everything and being sold as a replacement for people.
Something marketed as AGI should be treated as AGI when proving it isn't AGI.
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Most people do. It's just called AI in the media everywhere and marketing works. I think online folks forget that something as simple as getting a Lemmy account by yourself puts you into the top quintile of tech literacy.
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well so much hype has been generated around chatgpt being close to AGI that now it makes sense to ask questions like "can chatgpt prove the Riemann hypothesis"
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this is because an LLM is not made for playing chess
Sometimes it seems like most of these AI articles are written by AIs with bad prompts.
Human journalists would hopefully do a little research. A quick search would reveal that researches have been publishing about this for over a year so there's no need to sensationalize it. Perhaps the human journalist could have spent a little time talking about why LLMs are bad at chess and how researchers are approaching the problem.
LLMs on the other hand, are very good at producing clickbait articles with low information content.
Gotham chess has a video of making chatgpt play chess against stockfish. Spoiler: chatgpt does not do well. It plays okay for a few moves but then the moment it gets in trouble it straight up cheats. Telling it to follow the rules of chess doesn't help.
This sort of gets to the heart of LLM-based "AI". That one example to me really shows that there's no actual reasoning happening inside. It's producing answers that statistically look like answers that might be given based on that input.
For some things it even works. But calling this intelligence is dubious at best.
Because it doesn't have any understanding of the rules of chess or even an internal model of the game state, it just has the text of chess games in its training data and can reproduce the notation, but nothing to prevent it from making illegal moves, trying to move or capture pieces that don't exist, incorrectly declaring check/checkmate, or any number of nonsensical things.
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In this case it's not even bad prompts, it's a problem domain ChatGPT wasn't designed to be good at. It's like saying modern medicine is clearly bullshit because a doctor loses a basketball game.
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I swear every single article critical of current LLMs is like, "The square got BLASTED by the triangle shape when it completely FAILED to go through the triangle shaped hole."
It's newsworthy when the sellers of squares are saying that nobody will ever need a triangle again, and the shape-sector of the stock market is hysterically pumping money into companies that make or use squares.
It's also from a company claiming they're getting closer to create morphing shape that can match any hole.
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Ah, you used logic. That's the issue. They don't do that.
Tbf, the article should probably mention the fact that machine learning programs designed to play chess blow everything else out of the water.
Yeah its like judging how great a fish is at climbing a tree. But it does show that it's not real intelligence or reasoning
Machine learning has existed for many years, now. The issue is with these funding-hungry new companies taking their LLMs, repackaging them as "AI" and attributing every ML win ever to "AI".
ML programs designed and trained specifically to identify tumors in medical imaging have become good diagnostic tools. But if you read in news that "AI helps cure cancer", it makes it sound like it was a lone researcher who spent a few minutes engineering the right prompt for Copilot.
Yes a specifically-designed and finely tuned ML program can now beat the best human chess player, but calling it "AI" and bundling it together with the latest Gemini or Claude iteration's "reasoning capabilities" is intentionally misleading. That's why articles like this one are needed. ML is a useful tool but far from the "super-human general intelligence" that is meant to replace half of human workers by the power of wishful prompting
I forgot which airline it is but one of the onboard games in the back of a headrest TV was a game called “Beginners Chess” which was notoriously difficult to beat so it was tested against other chess engines and it ranked in like the top five most powerful chess engines ever
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ChatGPT has been, hands down, the worst AI coding assistant I've ever used.
It regularly suggests code that doesn't compile or isn't even for the language.
It generally suggests AC of code that is just a copy of the lines I just wrote.
Sometimes it likes to suggest setting the same property like 5 times.
It is absolute garbage and I do not recommend it to anyone.
I find it really hit and miss. Easy, standard operations are fine but if you have an issue with code you wrote and ask it to fix it, you can forget it
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LLM are not built for logic.
And yet everybody is selling to write code.
The last time I checked, coding was requiring logic.
To be fair, a decent chunk of coding is stupid boilerplate/minutia that varies environment to environment, language to language, library to library.
So LLM can do some code completion, filling out a bunch of boilerplate that is blatantly obvious, generating the redundant text mandated by certain patterns, and keeping straight details between languages like "does this language want join as a method on a list with a string argument, or vice versa?"
Problem is this can be sometimes more annoying than it's worth, as miscompletions are annoying.
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Using an LLM as a chess engine is like using a power tool as a table leg. Pretty funny honestly, but it's obviously not going to be good at it, at least not without scaffolding.
is like using a power tool as a table leg.
Then again, our corporate lords and masters are trying to replace all manner of skilled workers with those same LLM "AI" tools.
And clearly that will backfire on them and they'll eventually scramble to find people with the needed skills, but in the meantime tons of people will have lost their source of income.
If you believe LLMs are not good at anything then there should be relatively little to worry about in the long-term, but I am more concerned.
It's not obvious to me that it will backfire for them, because I believe LLMs are good at some things (that is, when they are used correctly, for the correct tasks). Currently they're being applied to far more use cases than they are likely to be good at -- either because they're overhyped or our corporate lords and masters are just experimenting to find out what they're good at and what not. Some of these cases will be like chess, but others will be like code*.
(* not saying LLMs are good at code in general, but for some coding applications I believe they are vastly more efficient than humans, even if a human expert can currently write higher-quality less-buggy code.)
I believe LLMs are good at some things
The problem is that they're being used for all the things, including a large number of tasks that thwy are not well suited to.
yeah, we agree on this point. In the short term it's a disaster. In the long-term, assuming AI's capabilities don't continue to improve at the rate they have been, our corporate overlords will only replace people for whom it's actually worth it to them to replace with AI.
Hardly surprising. Llms aren't -thinking- they're just shitting out the next token for any given input of tokens.
That's exactly what thinking is, though.
An LLM is an ordered series of parameterized / weighted nodes which are fed a bunch of tokens, and millions of calculations later result generates the next token to append and repeat the process. It's like turning a handle on some complex Babbage-esque machine. LLMs use a tiny bit of randomness ("temperature") when choosing the next token so the responses are not identical each time.
But it is not thinking. Not even remotely so. It's a simulacrum. If you want to see this, run ollama with the temperature set to 0 e.g.
ollama run gemma3:4b
>>> /set parameter temperature 0
>>> what is a leaf
You will get the same answer every single time.
I suppose it's an interesting experiment, but it's not that surprising that a word prediction machine can't play chess.
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All these comments asking "why don't they just have chatgpt go and look up the correct answer".
That's not how it works, you buffoons, it trains off of datasets long before it releases. It doesn't think. It doesn't learn after release, it won't remember things you try to teach it.
Really lowering my faith in humanity when even the AI skeptics don't understand that it generates statistical representations of an answer based on answers given in the past.
Can ChatGPT actually play chess now? Last I checked, it couldn't remember more than 5 moves of history so it wouldn't be able to see the true board state and would make illegal moves, take it's own pieces, materialize pieces out of thin air, etc.
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Can i fistfight ChatGPT next? I bet I could kick its ass, too :p
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