3 ms·

Im 1600 rated player and this took me 20 seconds to solve, is this really considered a very hard puzzle? The obvious moves dont work, you can see whites pawn m

Im 1600 rated player and this took me 20 seconds to solve, is this really considered a very hard puzzle? The obvious moves dont work, you can see whites pawn moving forward is mate, and you can see black is essentially trapped and has very limited moves, so immediately I thought first move is a waiting move and theres only two options there. Block the black pawn moving and if bishop moves, rook takes is mate. So rook has to block, and you can see bishop either moves or captures and pawn moving forward is mate

bubblyworld 1y ago
Agreed, I'm similar fide (not rated but ~2k lichess) and it took me a few seconds as well. Not a hard puzzle, for a regular chess player anyway.
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IanCal 1y ago
I don't know, I didn't spot the answer and it's from a list of hard puzzles from a chess coach. The model also wasn't told it was mate in 2 (or even if a mate was possible), just to solve it and it was white to move. https://www.chess.com/blog/ThePawnSlayer/checkmate-in-two-puzzles-test-very-hard https://www.chess.com/blog/ThePawnSlayer/checkmate-in-two-pu... Although perhaps this is missing the point - the process and chain here in response to an image and a sentence is extremely impressive. You can argue it's not useful, or not useful for specific use cases but it's impressive.
- pjob 1y ago
  I came away much less impressed than you did. The "step by step analysis" consists mostly of it considering, ruling out, and reconsidering an obviously invalid move. The code that it "tries to write" first zooms and pans around the image for no reason as it's already identified the layout of the pieces in the initial analysis. It then tries to import a library it has not yet installed in the sandbox (in addition to importing `chess.polyglot` for no discernable reason) before giving up on that thread entirely. It then manages to write a one-liner that contains an IndentationError before spending more time/tokens reestablishing the board layout. It does all of this before finally delegating the question to a search engine. If you just paste the image into a search engine (without needing to include the text prompt) the first result contains the solution. We live in a world where Sam Altman claims that usage of words like "please" and "thank you" in prompts have cost OpenAI "tens of millions of dollars"[0]. In this case, OpenAI's "most powerful reasoning model"[1] spends 7m 51s churning through expensive output tokens spinning its wheels before ultimately giving up and searching the internet. This strikes me as incredibly wasteful. It feels like the LLM equivalent of "punch[ing] through the table". The most impressive thing to me here is that OpenAI is getting people to pay for all this nonsense. [0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/04/22/please-thank-you-chatgpt-openai-energy-costs/83207447007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/04/22/please-thank-... [1] https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/compare https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/compare
SirMaster 1y ago
Yeah I came here to say this... I don't even play chess (though I know the rules) and I solved this in a few minutes of looking at it. There is no way this is "hard" unless I simply got lucky? Not sure what the odds are of getting lucky solving a puzzle like this as I have never done a chess puzzle before.

bubblyworld 1y ago

Agreed, I'm similar fide (not rated but ~2k lichess) and it took me a few seconds as well. Not a hard puzzle, for a regular chess player anyway.

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IanCal 1y ago

I don't know, I didn't spot the answer and it's from a list of hard puzzles from a chess coach. The model also wasn't told it was mate in 2 (or even if a mate was possible), just to solve it and it was white to move. https://www.chess.com/blog/ThePawnSlayer/checkmate-in-two-puzzles-test-very-hard https://www.chess.com/blog/ThePawnSlayer/checkmate-in-two-pu... Although perhaps this is missing the point - the process and chain here in response to an image and a sentence is extremely impressive. You can argue it's not useful, or not useful for specific use cases but it's impressive.

pjob 1y ago
I came away much less impressed than you did. The "step by step analysis" consists mostly of it considering, ruling out, and reconsidering an obviously invalid move. The code that it "tries to write" first zooms and pans around the image for no reason as it's already identified the layout of the pieces in the initial analysis. It then tries to import a library it has not yet installed in the sandbox (in addition to importing `chess.polyglot` for no discernable reason) before giving up on that thread entirely. It then manages to write a one-liner that contains an IndentationError before spending more time/tokens reestablishing the board layout. It does all of this before finally delegating the question to a search engine. If you just paste the image into a search engine (without needing to include the text prompt) the first result contains the solution. We live in a world where Sam Altman claims that usage of words like "please" and "thank you" in prompts have cost OpenAI "tens of millions of dollars"[0]. In this case, OpenAI's "most powerful reasoning model"[1] spends 7m 51s churning through expensive output tokens spinning its wheels before ultimately giving up and searching the internet. This strikes me as incredibly wasteful. It feels like the LLM equivalent of "punch[ing] through the table". The most impressive thing to me here is that OpenAI is getting people to pay for all this nonsense. [0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/04/22/please-thank-you-chatgpt-openai-energy-costs/83207447007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/04/22/please-thank-... [1] https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/compare https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/compare

SirMaster 1y ago

Yeah I came here to say this... I don't even play chess (though I know the rules) and I solved this in a few minutes of looking at it. There is no way this is "hard" unless I simply got lucky? Not sure what the odds are of getting lucky solving a puzzle like this as I have never done a chess puzzle before.