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Comment by Dr_Birdbrain | Hacker News Reader

I used to believe this, but then I saw the demo of ChatGPT attempting to play chess.

The rules of chess are much simpler than any structure of the real world we might hope for it to understand—and yet it failed to learn the rules of chess.

Based on this, I am pretty sure it has not learned any meaningful structure.

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The rules of chess are a strict computation. LLMs are translators and synthesizers, not computers. They can translate text reliably into chess commands but the state of the board needs to be maintained by a computer that interfaces with the LLM. An LLM is the wrong model to use for chess just like an LLM is the wrong model to use for image classification.

Newspapers used to have chess puzzles in them you could read and solve. ChatGPT is already surprisingly good at riddles, with better training I think it’d be fine at suggesting chess moves. Just like a person it’s about defining the mental model and making a decision.

ChatGPT is version 1, super rough, very broad training, more of a shotgun approach. They already made some quick math improvements. I'm sure if they focused on chess training for example it would be better. I myself am pretty crap at chess and could use some training as well.

> I'm sure if they focused on chess training for example it would be better.

That misses the point. Intelligent beings (humans) can learn the rules of any board game given enough time. We don't need special training. What your parent comment says is it can't even learn the rules, let alone be good at it.

Like I said ChatGP has taken the shotgun brute force approach to training. So yea future versions can be trained to play games, just like people are, and future future versions will need less training overall.

The rules of English are ridiculously more complicated than chess, and it has that figured out just fine.

I know the rules of chess, including en passant, threefold repetition and all the weird castling requirements, but I would still have a lot of difficulty playing chess by keeping the state of the board in my mind and playing by saying e4, e5, Nf3, etc. out loud.

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