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by imtringued 348 days ago
Anthropomorphic fallacy.

Human fails at task due to not knowing the rules in perfect detail.

AI fails at task even though it knows the rules and could easily reproduce them for chess and dozens of chess variants.

"Look! The fallibility of humans rubbed off onto the AI, proving that they are more human and AGI than we give them credit to!"

1 comments

I'm not sure how you consider this to be an anthropomorphic fallacy, the comparison to the situation with a human exists only because people are prepared to stipulate that humans can reason. That does not assume something about AI behaviour to be like a human's. It is showing the same test applied to a human.

Your statement that AI knows the rules would be considered anthropomorphising by many, I take it more to mean it 'knows' in the same sense that an election 'wants' to be at a lower energy level.

That said, humans who have written entire books on chess have been known to play illegal moves. That should count as proof by counterexample that your reasoning as to why humans fail at tasks is false.

> It is showing the same test applied to a human.

But you misrepresented the test with respect to humans. Humans who know how to play chess don't make illegal moves.

> That said, humans who have written entire books on chess have been known to play illegal moves.

Citation needed. Unless you are talking about stories from when they first learned the rules?

Did you read those? These are the "illegal" moves listed:

5. Mouse slip

4. Forgot to call check

3. Accidentally touched 2 pieces, tried to fix it

2. Forgot to hit the clock button

1. Castle through attacked square

So, the only one of these that was an acual "illegal move" of the sort LLMs make was the castle through attacked square.

LLMs sometimes just move pieces wherever. And that does not happen when humans who know the rules play. Yes, they may mess up en passant or promotion too. But a basic "how a single piece moves" rule is what LLMs f up.

I wouldn't count mouseslips as legitimately illegal moves either, they are also incredibly rare because most online players play with auto confinement to legal moves.

Moving through check definitely counts as as an example of a human knowing the rule and yet playing the move anyway. Which was the position you took when claiming humans would not do moves against rules they have learned.

In my experience sub 2000 players playing OTB informal chess do illegal moves fairly regularly, perhaps 1 in 50 games. Moving knights one square too far, slipping a bishop from one line to the next on a long diagonal. Castling after moving the king, not moving out of check, moving into check (especially by moving a pinned piece)

They all meet the criteria of knowing the rules and playing something else. Oftentimes people do this because they have a mistaken assumption about board state. I suspect the same is true for LLMs, they are making valid moves for what they mistakenly think the board is. That would be difficult to test, but I think possible with the right introspection tools.

Not sure how you don't see the difference between an LLM f'ing up how a single piece moves vs forgetting to hit the clock, accidentally touching two pieces or forgetting to call check. At least we agree and recognize that a mouse slip as different. Seems like some serious apologizing/rationalizing for LLMs on the other "moves". Anyway, have a good day, buddy.