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Comment by orwin | Hacker News Reader

That's quite untrue. I taught my (adult) brother the moves, the only illegal move he ever tried against me (over his 6 first games) was a castle with a rook that already moved twice. Within a few hundred games (less than 500 for sure, he played 3 minutes blitz but always took at least 10 minutes analyzing his games) he was rated 1100 on lichess (which is like 1050 on chess.com and unranked in the real world).

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So your brother tried to make illegal moves while learning the game and it took your brother hundreds of games to get to be a decent player? I don't see how this contradicts anything I said...

The _only_ illegal move a human might make as a beginner is a failed en passant or a bad castle. And yes, a few hundred games is all it takes to be better than any publicly available LLM at the moment.

...and mistakes like not seeing discovered checks, castling into check, trying to castle out of check, castling through a check, missing checks when promoting a piece, misunderstanding how stalemate works, etc?

If you compared a human after hundreds of games to a SOTA LLM that was also trained on the output of hundreds of chess games that it played, I suspect you would notice similar improvements.

Honestly, if we're only talking about SOTA llms, in sandbox mode without harness? No shot. Without harness LLMs have no memory of previous moves. I can't make the last version of chatgpt remember more than 5 movements. I guarantee you, if you do not add flags in the harness with 'left rook moved' or 'right rook moved', it will try to illegally castle 100% of the time it's in the situation. Llm+harness, just make it call stockfish tbh.

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