Comment by ethbr1
1 year ago
> Chess is stateless with perfect information.
It is not stateless, because good chess isn't played as a series of independent moves -- it's played as a series of moves connected to a player's strategy.
> What's the difference between a great explanation of a move and explaining every possible move then selecting the best one?
Continuing from the above, "best" in the latter sense involves understanding possible future moves after the next move.
Ergo, if I looked at all games with the current board state and chose the next move that won the most games, it'd be tactically sound but strategically ignorant.
Because many of those next moves were making that next move in support of some broader strategy.
> it's played as a series of moves connected to a player's strategy.
That state belongs to the player, not to the game. You can carry your own state in any game you want - for example remember who starts with what move in rock paper scissors, but that doesn't make that game stateful. It's the player's decision (or bot's implementation) to use any extra state or not.
I wrote "previous moves" specifically (and the extra bits already addressed elsewhere), but the LLM can carry/rebuild its internal state between the steps.
If we're talking about LLMs, then the state belongs to it.
So even if the rules of chess are (mostly) stateless, the resulting game itself is not.
Thus, you can't dismiss concerns about LLMs having difficulty tracking state by saying that chess is stateless. It's not, in that sense.
> good chess isn't played as a series of independent moves -- it's played as a series of moves connected to a player's strategy.
Maybe good chess, but not perfect chess. That would by definition be game-theoretically optimal, which in turn implies having to maintain no state other than your position in a large but precomputable game tree.
Right, but your position also includes whether or not you still have the right to castle on either side, whether each pawn has the right to capture en passant or not, the number of moves since the last pawn move or capture (for tracking the 50 move rule), and whether or not the current position has ever appeared on the board once or twice prior (so you can claim a draw by threefold repetition).
So in practice, your position actually includes the log of all moves to that point. That’s a lot more state than just what you can see on the board.