It's not a trick. Every information can be represented by sequence of bits or strings. It's not the surprising part. It's just that its a telling sign that thro

It's not a trick. Every information can be represented by sequence of bits or strings. It's not the surprising part. It's just that its a telling sign that through compression understanding of the game emerges because: 1- unlike language where you can make an argument that maybe model had seen this example in the training set and just parroting it back, you can't really memorize the possible states of chess and thus you can be reasonably sure that any game or state it is in, must be OOD. 2- If the system still plays well with OOD examples, it must be gaining understanding of the game itself. Also check out the Othello paper, where they show the evidence for an LLM encoding the game state in its neurons.