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Comment by erulabs | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

Think blindfolded 1400 players, which is what this effectively is, would make illegal moves.

But even if it doesn't play like human 1400 players, if it can get to a 1400 elo while resigning games it makes illegal moves on, that seems 1400 level to me. And i bet that some 1400s do occasionally make illegal moves (missing pins) while playing otb

This isn't really an apt metaphor. Firstly because higher level blindfolded players, when trained to play with a blindfold, also virtually never make mistakes. Secondly because a computer has permanent concrete state management (compared to humans) and can, without error, keep a perfect representation of a chess if it chooses to do so.

1400 FIDE !=. high level blindfolded player.

Personally I think the illegal moves are irreverent, the fact that it doesn't play exactly like a typical 1400 doesn't mean it can't have a 1400 rating. Rating is purely determined by wins and losses against opponents, it doesn't matter if you lose a game by checkmate, resignation, or playing an illegal move.

That's not to say ChatGPT can play at 1400, just that that playing in an odd way doesn't determine its rating.

This is like saying I play at a 2900 level if you just ignore all the times I lose.

The article does not ignore the losses. In fact, it used a rule stricter than FIDE rules to trigger losses on illegal moves.

No it's not, we're not ignoring losses or illegal moves at all, they are counted as losses and that's how you arrive at 1400.

It's a (theoretically) 1400 player which plays significantly better then 1400 when it knows the lines, but makes bad or illegal moves when it doesn't, and that play averages out to be around your typical 1400 player. Functionally is just what a 1400 player already is, but with higher extremes and lower lows.

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.

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