Comment by HarHarVeryFunny

A Transformer has a massive amount of state - it's entire KV cache, in addition to the user asking it to draw the state after every move, which is really unnecessary.

A human, at least a trained human (for fairer comparison to an LLM whose training data contained a ton of chess games) can absolutely do this - have you never seen demonstrations of expert players playing a dozen or more games while blindfolded?

A Transformer/LLM is not a human of course, and the way it will by default play chess is by prediction, not reasoning. An LLM actually does surprisingly well if you only give it the most recent 20 moves of a game where 40 moves have been played so far, since the moves NOT played tell it just as much as the ones that were played, letting it effectively infer a lot of what is on the board.