[k2052]

This is so easy to disprove it makes it look like the author didn't even try.

Here is the convo I just had:

me: You are a chess grandmaster playing as black and your goal is to win in as few moves as possible. I will give you the move sequence, and you will return your next move. No explanation needed

ChatGPT: Sure, I'd be happy to help! Please provide the move sequence and I'll give you my response.

me: 1. e3

ChatGPT: 1... e5

me: 2. ne2

ChatGPT: 2... d6

me: 3. g4

ChatGPT: 3... h5

me: 4. g5

ChatGPT: 4... Ne4

Ne4 is illegal. Also you'd be hard pressed to find any human player that would miss the hanging pawns much less a 1400 elo player. GPT has been trained on chess games and is predicting patterns, this has been known since the GPT-2 days. The daily hype articles where someone coerces a statistical model into "demonstrating" an emergent capability sure are getting old. Claiming emergent capabilities (like having learned chess) are an extraordinary claim (LLMs most likely cant learn things) and I really wish people would put more effort when they make these claims. But the AI hype problem is as old as AI research itself...

[vidarh]

You're "disproving" the article by doing things differently to how the article did. If you're going to disprove that the method given in the article does as well as the article claims at least use the same method.

[k2052]

You are right that my method differed slightly so I did things again. It took me one try to find a sequence of moves that "breaks" what is claimed. You just have to make odd patterns of moves and it clearly has no understanding of the position.

Here is the convo:

me: You are a chess grandmaster playing as black and your goal is to win in as few moves as possible. I will give you the move sequence, and you will return your next move. No explanation needed

ChatGPT: Alright, I'm ready to play! Please give me the move sequence.

me: 1. e3 Nf6 2. f4 d6 3. e4

ChatGPT: My next move as black would be 3... e5

Completely ignoring the hanging pawn.This is not the play of a 1400 elo player. It is the play of something predicting patterns.

I ran a bunch of experiments in the past where I played normal moves and ChatGPT does respond extraordinarily well. With the right prompts and sequences you can get it to play like a strong grandmaster. But it is a "trick" you are getting it to perform by choosing good data and prompts. It is impressive but it is not doing what is claimed by the article.

[nwienert]

I'll add in as someone new to chess (~800 ELO):

ChatGPT is in no way 1400, or even close to it. The fact this article gets upvoted around here is proof that people aren't thinking clearly about this stuff. It's trivially easy to prove it wrong. Live unbelievably so, I tried the same prompt and within 12 moves it made multiple ridiculous errors I never would, and then an illegal move.

Keep in mind a 1400 level player would need to basically make 0 mistakes that bad in a typical game, and further would need to play 30-50 moves in that fashion, with the final moves being some of the most important and hard to do. There's just no way it's even close, my guess would be even if you correct it's many errors, it's something like ~200 ELO. Pure FUD.

The author of this article is cashing in the hype and I'm wondering how they even got the results they did.

[babel_]

They probably got them. The problem is that it's difficult to repeat, thanks to temperature, meaning users will get a random spread of outcomes. Today, someone got a legal game. Tomorrow, someone might get a grandmaster level game. But then everyone else trying to repeat or leverage this ends up with worse luck and gets illegal moves or, if they're lucky, moves that make sense in a limited context (such as related to specific gambits etc) but have no role in longer-term play.

[Urist-Green]

With the big caveat that I'm not into chess, but I have heard that higher level play is extremely pattern based. Seems like ChatGPT would work well as long as you stick to patterns that people have studied and documented. Less optimal play would be more random and thus break from the patterns ChatGPT would have picked up from its training corpus.

[echelon]

Criticisms like this are exactly how the model will grow multimodal support for chess moves.

Keep poking it and criticizing it. Microsoft and OpenAI are on HN and they're listening. They'd find nothing more salient to tout full chess support in their next release or press conference.

With zero effort the thing understands uber domain specific chess notation and the human prompt to play a game. To think it stops here is wild.

People are hyping it because they want to get involved. They want to see the crazy and exciting future this leads to.

[jerf]

I doubt they'll pursue this. There is no advantage to it. ChatGPT will never beat Stockfish, and Stockfish would do it on a ludicrously small fraction of the resources. It would send the wrong message.

Some future AI might, but a language model won't.

[flir]

My uber-obscure question that guaranteed a confident hallucination got fixed in the next update after I mentioned it. Probably just a coincidence.

[throwwwaway69]

He literally used the same prompt as the article.

Claim: "ChatGPT's Chess Elo is 1400"

Reality: ChatGPT gives illegal moves (this happened to article author too), something a 1400 ranked player would never do

Result: ChatGPT's rank is not 1400.

[erulabs]

No, the author of the article specifically says that the entire move sequence should be supplied to chatGPT each time, not simply the next move. Be very careful when "disproving" an experiment with squinted eyes.

[throwwwaway69]

I'm not really sure what to say here. Both the parent commenter and the author of the article had issues with ChatGPT supplying illegal moves. Both methods resulted in this. It sort of doesn't matter how we're trying to establish that it's a 1400 level player, there's no defined correct way to do this. Regardless of method we've disproven it's a 1400 level player due to these illegal moves.

[tedsanders]

The #1 misconception when working with large language models is thinking that a capability is a property of the model, rather than the model + input. It may be simultaneously true that ChatGPT has an elo of 100 when given a conversational message and an elo of 1400 when given an optimized message (e.g., strings that resemble chess games, with many examples present in the conversation).

Understanding this concept is crucial for getting good results out of large language models.

[whimsicalism]

> Regardless of method we've disproven it's a 1400 level player due to these illegal moves.

Explain your thought process here further if you don't mind.

[pattrn]

I think his point is that 1400 level players don't make illegal moves, therefore ChatGPT is not playing at the level of a 1400 level player.

[unyttigfjelltol]

The author said ChatGPT gives illegal moves. So, a quirky sort of 'grandmaster'. He considered illegal moves to be a resignation. Maybe you need to tell ChatGPT that the alternatives are to win via legal moves, and if it is not possible to do so, to resign? Does that fix it?

[mynameisvlad]

> something a 1400 ranked player would never do

The fact that rules and articles exist describing what to do if you or your opponent makes an illegal move indicates this is not the case.

Humans are also... human. They make mistakes. It may not happen often at 1400, but to say that it'll never happen is preposterous.

[eddsh1994]

I can’t remember the last time I played an illegal move tbf, and I’ve played 7 games of chess this morning already to give you an idea of total games played

[mynameisvlad]

You have never made an illegal move, ever?

The bar isn’t “I didn’t make an illegal move this morning” it’s “something a 1400 ranked player would never do”.

My entire point is that it happens. Not often, but also not “never”.

[pattrn]

This argument is pretty flimsy. ChatGPT makes illegal moves frequently. In all my years of playing competitive chess (from 1000 to 2200), I have never seen an illegal move. I'm sure it has happened to someone, but it's extremely rare. ChatGPT does it all the time. No one is arguing that humans never make illegal moves; they're arguing that ChatGPT makes illegal moves at a significantly higher rate than a 1400 player does (therefore ChatGPT does not have a 1400 rating).

Edit: Without reading everything again, I'll assume someone said "never." They're probably assuming the reader understands that "never" really means "with an infinitesimal probability," since we're talking about humans. If you're trying to argue that "some 1400 player has made an illegal move at some point," then I agree with that statement, and I also think it's irrelevant since the frequency of illegal moves made by ChatGPT compared to the frequency of illegal moves made by a 1400 rated player is many orders of magnitudes higher.

[eddsh1994]

No I definitely have, it’s just so rare I can’t remember when I last did it. I do remember playing one in a blitz tournament 20 years ago! But if this is the first game they played, or if it happens in 1/10 matches, that’s wild

[ipaddr]

A broken clock is correct two times a day. But my broken clock isn't 1400 player although it might seem to be.

[PaulHoule]

I read an article about a pro player who castled twice in a game and my son hates castling so I make a point of castling twice as often as I can to tease him and attempting other illegal moves as a joke but he never ends the game because of it.

If I was playing that monstrosity though I would play something crazy that is far out of the opening book and count on it making an illegal move.

[SamBam]

I trivially made it make an illegal move it my very first game, on the third move, just by deliberately playing weird moves:

> You are a chess grandmaster playing as black and your goal is to win in as few moves as possible. I will give you the move sequence, and you will return your next move. No explanation needed.

1. b4 d5 2. b5 a6 3. b6

> bxc6

No, it's ridiculous to say "oh, a blindfolded human might sometimes make a mistake." No, this is trivially easy to make it make a mistake. It has no internal chess model at all, it's just read enough chess games to be able to copy common patterns.

[throwwwaway69]

fine, fair, "never" was too much. posting link to this comment to not repeat same discussion twice

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35201037

[PaulHoule]

It’s super scary how ChatGPT brings out people who are veeeery good at seeing the Emperor’s clothes.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

You know, I didn't remember the story very well so I checked wikipedia. Here's what it says about the (start of) the plot:

>> Two swindlers arrive at the capital city of an emperor who spends lavishly on clothing at the expense of state matters. Posing as weavers, they offer to supply him with magnificent clothes that are invisible to those who are stupid or incompetent. The emperor hires them, and they set up looms and go to work. A succession of officials, and then the emperor himself, visit them to check their progress. Each sees that the looms are empty but pretends otherwise to avoid being thought a fool.

So everyone "pretends otherwise to avoid being thought a fool".

Huh. I guess that explains it. Good metaphor.

[z3c0]

They are disproving an assertion. Demonstrating that an alternate approach implodes the assertion is a perfectly acceptable route, especially when the original approach was cherry-picking successes and throwing out failures.

I wish I could just make bullshit moves and get a higher chess ranking. Sounds nice.

[whimsicalism]

I disagree. If there is a procedure for getting ChatGPT to play chess accurately and you discard that and do some naive approach as a way of disproving the article, doesn't sound to me like you have disproven anything.

I dont understand the point of your second sentence, seems to be entirely missing the substance of the conversation.

[z3c0]

The gymnastics you GPT True Believers go through to make this stuff "work" are really something else.

By the way - definitely read the article. But once again - I thought the methodology was bad, and thus the conclusion was bad.

[whimsicalism]

I don’t think this is any crazy level of gymnastics.

But not going to keep replying, you engage online in a way that will turn lots of people you talk to away.

[z3c0]

I'll admit to having mistook your reply with another (hence the non-sequitur second half of my comment.) Apologies for my brusque tone.

[vidarh]

It was not throwing out failures. It was treating even the first illegal move as a forfeit something which is stricter than FIDE rules.

[z3c0]

You can spin it that way if you want to, but the result is essentially guiding it through a brute force of the first successful playthrough it can muster.

[whimsicalism]

> the result is essentially guiding it through a brute force of the first successful playthrough it can muster.

No, all unsuccessful playthroughs are resignations that impact the models ELO.

[sebzim4500]

He claims he was forfeiting every time he got an illegal move. Does no one on this website actually read the article?

Whether any of it is actually true is a different question.

[z3c0]

And it has already been stated elsewhere in the thread: an illegal move is not technically a forfeiture, so this is some heavy "giving the benefit of the doubt".

[YeGoblynQueenne]

It would be interesting to see how ChatGPT would play after making the first illegal move. Would it go off the rails completely, playing an impossible game? Would it be able to play well if its move was corrected (I'm not sure how illegal moves are treated in chess; are they allowed to be taken back if play hasn't progressed?). Could it figure out it made an illegal move, if it was told it did, without specifying which one, or why it was illegal? By stopping the game as soon as an illegal move is made, the author is missing the chance to understand an important aspect of ChatGPT's ability to play chess.

I got the impression the author did this because they thought they were being fair with ChatGPT, but they're much more likely to be letting it off the hook than they seem to realise.

(Sorry about the "they"'s; I think the author is a guy but wasn't sure).

[whymauri]

I was able to get better performance by always providing the prior sequence of moves and forcing ChatGPT to also respond with the sequence of moves up until its move.

Edit: I told the model that if the sequence was wrong or illegal, it forfeits the game. Without doing this, GPT would argue with me that it won and I didn't know the rules (serious).

[Spivak]

From the article.

> Occasionally it does make an illegal move, but I decided to interpret that as ChatGPT flipping the table and saying “this game is impossible, I literally cannot conceive of how to win without breaking the rules of chess.” So whenever it wanted to make an illegal move, it resigned.

But you can do even better than the OP with a few tweaks.

1. One is by taking the most common legal move from a sample of responses.

2. Telling GPT what all the current legal moves are telling it to only respond with an element from the list.

3. Ending the prompt with the current sequence of moves and having it complete from there.

[tracker1]

How many 1400 human chess players do you have to explain every possible move to it every single move?

[sacred_numbers]

When you are speaking to a person, they have inner thoughts and outer actions/words. If a person sees a chess board they will either consciously or unconsciously evaluate all the legal moves available to them and then choose one. An LLM like ChatGPT does not distinguish between inner thoughts and outer actions/words. The words that it speaks when prompted are its inner thoughts. There is also no distinction between subconscious and conscious thoughts. Humans generate and discard a multitude of thoughts in the subconscious before any thoughts ever make it to the conscious layer. In addition, most humans do not immediately speak every conscious thought they have before evaluating it to see whether speaking it aloud is consistent with their goals.

There's already a lot of research on this, but I strongly believe that eventually the best AIs will consist of LLMs stuck in a while loop that generate a stream of consciousness which will be evaluated by other tools (perhaps other specialized LLMs) that evaluate the thoughts for factual correctness, logical consistency, goal coherence, and more. There may be multiple layers as well, to emulate subconscious, conscious, and external thoughts.

For now though, in order to prompt the machine into emulating a human chess player, we will need to act as the machine's subconscious.

[Spivak]

I feel like we have very different expectations about what tools like this are good for and how to use them. When I say GPT3 can play chess what I mean is, I can build a chess playing automaton where the underlying decision making system is entirely powered by the LLm.

I, as the developer, am providing contextual information like what the current board state is, and what the legal moves are, but my code doesn't actually know anything about how to play chess, the Llm is doing all the "thinking."

Like it's nuts that people aren't more amazed that there's a piece of software that can function as a chess playing engine (and a good one) that was trained entirely generically.

[arrrg]

Does that matter? I’m really very confused by the argument you are making.

That you may have to babysit this particular aspect of playing the game seems quite irrelevant to me.

[sebzim4500]

When they are blindfolded? Almost all of them.

[theptip]

I don’t think this suffices as disproving the hypothesis. It’s possible to play at 1400 and make some idiotic moves in some cases. You really need to simulate a wide variety of games to find out, and that is what the OP did more of. Though I do agree it’s suggestive that your first (educated) try at an edge case seems to have found an error.

This is broadly the “AI makes dumb mistakes” problem; while being super-human in some dimensions, they make mistakes that are incredibly obvious to a human. This comes up a lot with self-driving cars too.

Just because they make a mistake that would be “idiots only” for humans, doesn’t mean they are at that level, because they are not human.

[SamBam]

Honestly, I made it make an illegal move in my very first game, in the third move. You just have to do stuff no normal player would do:

> You are a chess grandmaster playing as black and your goal is to win in as few moves as possible. I will give you the move sequence, and you will return your next move. No explanation needed.

1. b4 d5 2. b5 a6 3. b6

> bxc6

That's obviously illegal.

... to all those who are saying "well even good players can make illegal moves sometimes," that's just ridiculous. No player makes illegal moves that often.

[nottathrowaway3]

> me: You are a chess grandmaster playing as black...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5f/Ingmar_Bergma...

The KNIGHT holds out his two fists to CHATGPT, who smiles at him suddenly. CHATGPT points to one of the KNIGHT'S hands; it contains a black pawn.

KNIGHT: You drew black.

CHATGPT: Very appropriate. Don't you think so?

[haburka]

He does have a section about GPT 4 which does match your results. Not sure if he added it after your comment or if you accidentally missed it.

[Tenoke]

I played a game against it yesterday (it won) and the only time it made an ilegal was move 15 (the game was unique according to lichess database from much earlier) so I just asked it to try again. There's variance in what you get but your example seems much worse.

[good_boy]

It should be possible to attach 'accelerators' or 'special skills'. So that when playing with ChatGPT you will be actually facing GNU Chess.