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This isn't how intelligence works. The LLM may not be able to play chess directly through inference, but it can write a program to do it and execute that progr
by consensus1 2mo ago
This isn't how intelligence works. The LLM may not be able to play chess directly through inference, but it can write a program to do it and execute that program. Same as how human intelligence works. We can't fly, but we can build planes.
- nefarious_ends 2mo agoThanks for saying this, feels like everyone has gone insane over this stuff.
- what 2mo agoHumans don’t code a $game engine to play $game, they can just play it. It seems like you are the one that has gone insane.
- hackinthebochs 2mo agoAnd how many years of direct play and study does it take for a human to get good at chess or any other game? Absolutely no human ever could be good at chess just by reading a few books, or even every book on chess. That's just not how the brain works. If LLMs could do that they would truly be superintelligence.
- sph 2mo agoNo, learning is definitely not a sign of super intelligence. I know words don’t mean anything anymore, but that is simply general intelligence, despite the claims we have reached this milestone.
- hackinthebochs 2mo agoNo, but superhuman capabilities derived from ordinary learning is, which is what the parent comment described. Why is that not obvious?
- lelanthran 2mo ago> And how many years of direct play and study does it take for a human to get good at chess or any other game? Time is irrelevant to training; the more relevant comparison is "how many games does a human need to play to get diminishing returns".
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- orwin 2mo agoA week. My brother learned and was above 1100 online within 12 hours, after a few hundred games.
- hackinthebochs 2mo agoWe're obviously using different meanings for "good" here. But aside from that, it took 100's to 1000's of reinforcement iterations for your brother to play competently. While certainly impressive, that is still an entirely different category from piecing together disparate facts learned during training (LLMs aren't analyzing a board as they're learning the rules or ingesting PGN files), to executing a competent performance in one shot.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 2mo ago> Absolutely no human ever could be good at chess just by reading a few books, or even every book on chess. Maybe not, but you'd be surprised how little it takes. A six year old child can learn the rules of chess well enough to be able to play legal moves only in a single day. And they can improve their game at a pace which is almost frightening to behold. I have taught children, and I've witnessed significant improvement materialise in a single game. LLMs have probably thousands of chess books, games, videos, etc in their training data, yet they are unable to even follow the rules. This is, at the very least, interesting. It illustrates many of the things brains can do, which current ML systems in general, and LLMs in particular, can't.
- hackinthebochs 2mo agoIt is interesting, but people are drawing the wrong conclusion from it. For one, LLMs don't go through a "chess learning phase". They're not analyzing a board as they're learning the rules or studying games to create a coherent model of chess. They're just imbibing raw relationships as isolated fragments of information. The fact that they can't unify this into a coherent model of chess playing in one shot and execute a competent game says nothing interesting about the limits of their intelligence. If you give frontier models the rules of chess in their context window, could they perform only legal moves? I bet they could, excepting trickier scenarios like pins and failing to respond to a check. But those kinds of scenarios have to be reinforced in any human player as well. Even Super GMs fall for mate-in-1's occasionally which is functionally equivalent to those kinds of failures.
- thesmtsolver2 2mo agoHuman beings can play chess directly without coding up a tool.
- consensus1 2mo agoVery poorly compared to the tools we have built. Similar to the LLM.
- thesmtsolver2 2mo agoComparing to raw LLMs? Much much better.
- shimman 2mo agoPoorly in what sense? I think human chess leagues are way more popular and fun than just playing a computer by yourself. Human oriented communities are always a vastly better experience than their digital counterparts. There's more to games than simply winning you know.
- qarl 2mo agoIf they wanted to train an LLM to play chess they could easily do so. But nobody wants that.
- jstanley 2mo agoAsking an LLM to play chess by writing algebraic notation is like asking a human to play chess blindfolded. Yes some people can do it but most people can't even if they're unusually intelligent. You really need to be giving the LLM a board representation. EDIT: I see that they actually were giving the LLMs a board representation and they still played badly. Fair enough then.