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I decided to reply to my own comment. In the video above, the initial moves are textbook. Then a position that has never been played is reached. At this point it appears to pattern match against a similar but different board and pattern matches some follow on board. The result is illegal moves and no ability to see checks, captures, threats, tactics.

Which is strange because I’m sure it could give general advice about how to play better, it just doesn’t follow the rules it can enumerate. It also doesn’t seem to have spatial awareness.

I used to think LLMs couldn’t do Fibonacci for the same reason. They could write the code but not follow it. They can now follow a procedure to generate fib numbers but it seems to be memory limited.

So I don’t know why it can track fib algo, but no chess concepts.

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because it wasn't trained to play chess

imagine a hypothetical chess match between:

- an undoubtedly very intelligent person. in the course of their studies, they have read about different chess strategies, openings, etc. but they never actually played the game themselves

- an average person with a year of chess playing experience

who do you think is going to win? of course, you could give the LLM time to think and consider its opponents potential next moves, but this is a computationally expensive way to play the game that doesn't scale

which is all beside the point that chess isn't a very good proxy for general intelligence. there is a correlation, but it's very weak

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