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I was a young child when I learned chess by reading a short book, then practicing with a friend. That is not how LLMs learn. I'm no expert on LLMs, but if you s

I was a young child when I learned chess by reading a short book, then practicing with a friend. That is not how LLMs learn. I'm no expert on LLMs, but if you showed a human all chess games and books in all history and then said 'play chess' and they still kept making illegal moves, they would have to have a brain injury.

harimau777 11d ago
It seems like an LLM potentially could learn that way if each practice game it participated in was added to its training data.
- willmarch 11d ago
  Yes, this is essentially how AlphaGo and AlphaZero algorithms work to train superhuman Go/chess/shogi agents. It’s an elegant algorithm that is analogous to how humans learn games.
  - zug_zug 10d ago
    Well except AlphaZero played 44 million chess games in that time (and actually played with a 44 core computer). So I'd like to point out that the human is still just a few orders of magnitude more efficient.
    - willmarch 10d ago
      Yes, we all know that biological systems are more efficient than machines through billions of years of evolution and natural selection but the overall process is largely the same (interacting with an environment, learning from results, improving underlying architecture, etc); efficiencies will come with more time and improvements.
      - zug_zug 10d ago
        Well if we make AI that learns at the rates humans do, it'll fundamentally undermine and destroy the relevance of all existing AI. It sounds to me like you're saying "we basically are there it's just a matter of degree" and I'm saying "No it's orders of magnitude off and probably won't be using LLMs at all and maybe a very fundamentally different type of neural net technology that hasn't been invented yet."
        willmarch 8d ago
        I guess we'll find out soon enough...
fhe 10d ago
but maybe... the said human has also read every other piece of text ever written, including ones about other (similar?) board games, which in aggregate vastly dwarfs whatever he has read on chess, that non-chess reading could have corrupted whatever he's learned about chess?

harimau777 11d ago

It seems like an LLM potentially could learn that way if each practice game it participated in was added to its training data.

willmarch 11d ago
Yes, this is essentially how AlphaGo and AlphaZero algorithms work to train superhuman Go/chess/shogi agents. It’s an elegant algorithm that is analogous to how humans learn games.
- zug_zug 10d ago
  Well except AlphaZero played 44 million chess games in that time (and actually played with a 44 core computer). So I'd like to point out that the human is still just a few orders of magnitude more efficient.
  - willmarch 10d ago
    Yes, we all know that biological systems are more efficient than machines through billions of years of evolution and natural selection but the overall process is largely the same (interacting with an environment, learning from results, improving underlying architecture, etc); efficiencies will come with more time and improvements.
    - zug_zug 10d ago
      Well if we make AI that learns at the rates humans do, it'll fundamentally undermine and destroy the relevance of all existing AI. It sounds to me like you're saying "we basically are there it's just a matter of degree" and I'm saying "No it's orders of magnitude off and probably won't be using LLMs at all and maybe a very fundamentally different type of neural net technology that hasn't been invented yet."
      - willmarch 8d ago
        I guess we'll find out soon enough...

fhe 10d ago

but maybe... the said human has also read every other piece of text ever written, including ones about other (similar?) board games, which in aggregate vastly dwarfs whatever he has read on chess, that non-chess reading could have corrupted whatever he's learned about chess?