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Comment by peab

12 hours ago

What levels are they actually at in your experience?

Sub 1300 that's my rating in the singular official tournament I participated at.

But given how easily I can crush them and how often they want to make illegal moves (btw above bench seems to use a harness that pokea the model until it gives valid moves).

I would rate them around 500-800 big range but at that level it's all about if the model can recall an opening or not. If it plays good first 4-8 moves the person on the end will fumble for certain and they win.

I can play good/best moves till 14-15 moves if I remember the lines and find someone who falls for it.

If you could give them the lines as prompts like the best 20-30 openings then they will be around 700-800.

700 is around the rating for a human who doesn't know the tricks but can do bare minimum calculations and understands the rules thoroughly.

  • As someone who used to compete for years and plays currently as a hobbyist, you’re absolutely correct. LLM’s are terrible at chess and if anyone wants to sober up their view on AI, try it yourself.

    Anyone who casually plays on a regular basis can beat them more often than they lose. As you said if you just know the core openings (and end games, both of which you can get a handle on with modest effort) you will generally win.

    Edit: reminder we had computers beating the best players in the world literally decades ago. LLM’s are remarkable tools but the current promises and expectations are ridiculous

So you can see an actual game on that website, and the play seems pretty decent to me for a while (~1700 lichess = 1300 elo) until move 28 when black throws away their queen for absolutely no reason in an incomprehensible blunder.

In some ways this is reflective of the AI experience at large, sometimes shockingly competent but then also sometimes ludicrously incompetent.

  • I've always liked the analogy that talking to an LLM is like talking to a really, really smart person with a head injury.