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Comment by 10xDev

11 hours ago

If AI can program, why does it matter if it can play Chess using CoT when it can program a Chess Engine instead? This applies to other domains as well.

It can write a chess engine because it has read the code of a thousand of chess engines. This benchmark measures a different aspect of intelligence.

And as a poker player, I can say that this game is much more challenging for computers than chess, writing a program that can play poker really well and efficiently is an unsolved problem.

> If AI can program, why does it matter if it can play Chess using CoT when it can program a Chess Engine instead?

Heh, we really did come full circle on this! When chatgpt launched in dec22 one of the first things that people noticed is that it sucked at math. Like basic math 12 + 35 would trip it up. Then people "discovered" tool use, and added a calculator. And everyone was like "well, that's cheating, of course it can use a calculator, but look it can't do the simple addition logic"... And now here we are :)

  • IMO there's an expectation for baseline intelligence. I don't expect an "AGI" model to beat Magnus Carlsen out of the box but it should be able to do basic grade school level arithmetic and play chess at a complete beginner level without resorting to external tools.

I'm not going to respond to everything but the key to my comment was "This applies to other domains as well." But people are limiting their imagination to the chess engine example given for chess. The tool or program (or even other neural networks that are available) can be literally anything for any task... Use your imagination.

Maybe we should just get rid of tedious benchmarks like chess altogether at this point that is leading people to think of how to limit AI as a way of keeping it a relevant benchmark rather than expanding on what is already there.

They should be allowed to! In fact i think better benchmark would be to invent new games and test the models ability to allocate compute to minmax/alphazero new games in compute constraints

Its the same reason we are asked to write exams without using calculators but the real world does have them.

How you work without calculators is a proxy for real world competency.

  • Funny, you used probably the most useless form of benchmarking used on people as an example of measuring "competency" in the real world.

CoT is upstream of building a chess engine.

Chess engines don’t grow on trees, they’re built by intelligent systems that can think, namely human brains.

Supposedly we want to build machines that can also think, not just regurgitate things created by human brains. That’s why testing CoT is important.

It’s not actually about chess, it’s about thinking and intelligence.