3 ms·

Humans 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 18d 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? 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 18d ago
    No, 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 18d ago
      No, but superhuman capabilities derived from ordinary learning is, which is what the parent comment described. Why is that not obvious?
  • lelanthran 18d 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 17d ago
      [deleted]
  • orwin 18d ago
    A week. My brother learned and was above 1100 online within 12 hours, after a few hundred games.
    • hackinthebochs 17d ago
      We'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 18d 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 17d ago
      It 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.