Comment by skydhash
12 hours ago
Pretty much this. Feed it a book or two on chess, and you should have a decent (or good) player. That's the generic intelligence people have. The aims is not to be supremely talented at something, but being able to read a manual and figure how to use/play something. Mastery can be gained overtime.
1. The LLMs have surely ingested hundreds if not thousands of books on chess.
2. The study (along with other posters here) show the models can’t even stick to following the rules of the game
If you gave a human a book or two on chess they would not become a decent player (they would be closer to 500-600 than 1100 ELO) and they would only get better after playing hundreds or thousands of games (often making illegal moves and moves that violate the rules of chess as they learn).
Your assumptions/intuition about generic human intelligence feels quite incorrect, considering LLMs currently play better than a brand new human player would (presumably without any attempt to fine tune them specific on chess, such as playing thousands of games).
That's quite untrue. I taught my (adult) brother the moves, the only illegal move he ever tried against me (over his 6 first games) was a castle with a rook that already moved twice. Within a few hundred games (less than 500 for sure, he played 3 minutes blitz but always took at least 10 minutes analyzing his games) he was rated 1100 on lichess (which is like 1050 on chess.com and unranked in the real world).
So your brother tried to make illegal moves while learning the game and it took your brother hundreds of games to get to be a decent player? I don't see how this contradicts anything I said...
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the discussion isn’t really about whether language models can become strong chess players though, the point is they seem to struggle to consistently make valid moves. Most humans don’t need to read two books to pick that up, just a couple lines of basic instructions
That has not been my experience with new players, they regularly make invalid or incorrect moves even after detailed instructions especially in novel situations.
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> considering LLMs currently play better than a brand new human player would
They’ve ingested all the literature on playing chess, a brand new human player has not.
Yes, but my point is that humans can’t even do the thing that the above comments are claiming humans can do (read a book or two and be decent at chess), and then they complain that LLMs can’t do the same thing (that humans can’t do either).
We seem to be moving goalposts to the point that humans don’t even live up to the expectations of the AI critics. The only way you get better at chess is by playing a lot of games and learning from mistakes, that goes for humans or AI agents, not simply by reading about chess.
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