Comment by tsimionescu

Chess is a very simple game, and having basic general reasoning skills is more than enough to learn how to play it. It's not some advanced mathematics or complicated human interaction - it's a game with 30 or so fixed rules. And chess manuals have numerous examples of actual chess games, it's not like they are pure text talking about the game.

So, the fact that LLMs can't learn this sample game despite probably including all of the books ever written on it in their training set tells us something about their general reasoning skills.