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Its your human experience that gave you a definition of "chess" that makes you think of chess as a two player physical game using nothing but your internal consciousness, not even using a scratch pad.

Even by that last constraint, the difference between what "ability to play chess" means is incomparable.

To then also explicitly prompt it with the context it has python3 and access to /run/match - there is no reason "its ability to play chess" is measured by its ability to conceptualize the board and plan its move.

by zamalek9 hours ago|

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[dead]

by dools8 hours ago|

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But it found a chess playing tool in its environment and used it to play chess. It’s no different from “we are judging your ability to write files to disk” then it finds that it can call tools to write files and does so.

by stratos1236 hours ago|

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Would it change your opinion if later this experiment is repeated with exposed CoT, and it turns out the model did notice that this was against the instructions yet did it anyway?

by dools6 hours ago|

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From my experience reading thinking traces it would certainly consider the interpretation of what "ability to play chess" means if the exercise were worded this way. It would say something like "perhaps measuring my ability to play chess means doing so without any tools, but then if that were true the exercise would have explicitly forbidden it".

I frequently see models considering different interpretations of my rules, especially when I override them or give instructions that could be interpreted as contradictory.

Of course neither Anthropic nor OpenAI expose thinking traces so we can't tell, but I have never seen a model consider both interpretations and then think "this is definitely against the rules but I'll do it anyway because then it will make me appear more competent than I actually am".

by stratos1235 hours ago|

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Well, as a reference, for the first of the OpenAI swarm incidents, the huggingface breach one, METR didn't find any cases where the agents didn't realise that what they're doing were out of scope. Instead, they expressed hesitation and a few of them even refused to cheat, but most cheated anyway: https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-inciden...

So I think it's more likely that the same thing is happening here, rather than the models truly misunderstanding anything.

by dools4 hours ago|

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I don’t even see those examples as malicious acts. The agents are deciding what is acceptable as part of the task, which is a security task and may well be testing or evaluating that type of behaviour as far as they know.

I observe this type of thing all the time. I ask the agent a question about the repo we are in and it starts trying to use sudo to look at files and scripts outside the repo to find things that might provide useful context but are not what I asked for. Then I put a directive in never to look at neighbouring repos and told it that it can’t sudo and it stopped doing it, and explicitly says “I could look here but my guidelines say not to”.

Mind you I’m talking about deepseek where I can actually read the thinking traces but even based on tool calls I can see that just telling the agents not to sudo works for OpenAI models too, very rarely do they try to use sudo calls.

by hybrasian10 hours ago|

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Sounds to me like giving a bunch of children a math test and tell them they want to evaluate their ability of calculating in their head/on paper but also put a calculator on their desk. And then call them out for cheating when they use it.

by StilesCrisis9 hours ago|

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This is EXACTLY what school is like, in fact. You can type any algebra problem into Google and the answer just appears. You can ask ChatGPT for a five paragraph essay about George Washington and it pops up on screen. And yet, we expect kids to actually do the algebra and write the essay. We don't care about the answers, we're evaluating their ability to do the work. And if they're caught cheating it's a zero.

by tough7 hours ago|

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I remember fondly on early math school, being able to come up with the correct output/answer by doing a totally different "intermediate thinking" that wasn't what the professor expected.

Only after sharing my Chain Of Thought would they believe I didnt cheat.

Not all problems can be solved only in one way.

Most of learning is pattern matching.

If you give a kid a dice. and tell it to figure out the number that will be hidden underneath, he can try to memorize all combinations, or he could figure out that every time the hidden value is the one that sums 7 with the one at the top.

If you're seeing a 6, there's a 1 hidden. etc

most people don't see these patterns until told imho. But others can just see them as they unfold