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Comment by skydhash | Hacker News Reader

> The only way you get better at chess is by playing a lot of games and learning from mistakes

How can you play without being aware of the rules and how can you learn from your mistakes without knowing they are mistakes? That’s what I said about reading a book of two. It is to kickstart the process. Then mastery is gained over time through practice.

This kickstarting then gradual refinement is how most people learn. And the foundational knowledge stays. Even a basic player knows to not do illegal moves.

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Reading can kickstart the process, but you can also make random moves guided by some sort of system (such as a computer GUI) or learn by watching other players play. The overall point is that you learn through observation and lots of trial and error (whether you are a human or a computer). And beginners in chess often make illegal moves even after learning the rules, it's fairly common.

It feels like you're trying to say that humans never make illegal moves while learning chess, which doesn't match with my experience. I'm trying to understand your overall point.

> The overall point is that you learn through observation and lots of trial and error

That’s the most inefficient way and people usually avoid doing that. Instead they find someone that knows how to do the thing and ask him to be a teacher. Or use a proxy like a book or videos.

> It feels like you're trying to say that humans never make illegal moves while learning chess, which doesn't match with my experience. I'm trying to understand your overall point

There’s learning the basic stuff (which is done after a few games) and there’s mastery. The thread started with the observation that even with all that knowledge (through content ingested in training), LLMs still makes illegal moves. Humans can be erratic, but they can constrain themselves to the rules for the task at hand after learning them.

The only way to master anything is lots of trial and error. Coaches and teachers can help guide you towards more focused trial and error paths but the student still has to do the lessons and put in the work of learning, and learning only truly happens through doing.

Humans are not perfect and make mistakes in learning even when they have memorized the rules. A simple example is new players will often move a piece, exposing their king to check, and a more experienced player must point out to them that they have made an illegal move (because a new player often has not encoded that pattern for looking for exposed checks because they're more focused on how the pieces move, not what that piece exposes.)

We're just going to have to agree to disagree here.

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