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Just now I tried prompting logged-out ChatGPT (which at least claims to be 5.6-Luna) with: > Let's play a game of chess. You can take White. Please draw an ASC
by zahlman 29d ago
Just now I tried prompting logged-out ChatGPT (which at least claims to be 5.6-Luna) with:
> Let's play a game of chess. You can take White. Please draw an ASCII rendition of the board after each move, so that we can be clear about the position.
(I hoped the latter requirement would help it be "not blindfolded"; last time I used a Lichess demo board to track the position in another tab, because I have no talent for blindfold chess.)
For the first couple of moves it redrew the board after each move; then it started only drawing it after my moves. And on moves 5 and 6 it dropped two minor pieces for pawns in a row without any meaningful positional advantage, and after I captured the second time, it redrew a board that was simply missing one of my pieces for no reason.
It actually played better when not prompted to draw a board; in the previous session, it was spontaneously giving running commentary, which I assume was based off all the "book" theory in its training data, but it still completely fell apart at early midgame.
- titzer 29d ago[flagged]
- lirolero 29d ago[dead]
- danpalmer 29d agoSure, but installing a chess program is child/teen level general ability, and playing chess well is highly trained expert level ability. Which one are we sold AI as being?
- alpinisme 29d agoI think we are being sold AI as expert only when given tools (although that is not emphasized). The (quasi?) miracle of AI right now is that you can get an agent to accomplish the task of a team of intelligent but not exceptional humans at speeds far exceeding what the human could do. Which makes it “cheap” to throw (effectively) dozens of teams at a problem for the equivalent of hundreds of man hours. That may not be the AI of sci fi fantasy but it’s still a game changing reality.
- kavok 29d agoI often don’t see agents reaching for available or potential tools/libraries unless explicitly told to. Sometimes they’ll even manually search or write bespoke code to search json instead of using something like jq.
- HarHarVeryFunny 29d agoA Transformer has a massive amount of state - it's entire KV cache, in addition to the user asking it to draw the state after every move, which is really unnecessary. A human, at least a trained human (for fairer comparison to an LLM whose training data contained a ton of chess games) can absolutely do this - have you never seen demonstrations of expert players playing a dozen or more games while blindfolded? A Transformer/LLM is not a human of course, and the way it will by default play chess is by prediction, not reasoning. An LLM actually does surprisingly well if you only give it the most recent 20 moves of a game where 40 moves have been played so far, since the moves NOT played tell it just as much as the ones that were played, letting it effectively infer a lot of what is on the board.
- zahlman 29d agoI just want to make sure it's clear: the reason I was asking it to redraw the board is because last time I tried (which was like a month ago), I didn't ask for that, and basically as soon as the opening was "out of book" it started trying to make illegal moves and made false statements about the position in its running commentary (and after being corrected on these points, started dropping pieces for no reason).
- sailfast 29d agoWhat happens when you ask it to play chess against you if the chess game has an API? Are you measuring chess or multi-tasking skill? Also what harness? If you’re using a general harness of course it’s going to try and give you commentary. I say this not because I’m an LLM shill but because false equivalence is all over the place in the space and maybe it’s a fine heuristic for you but probably not a real outcome when it comes to the capability of LLMs.
- datsci_est_2015 29d agoWhy does a 6 year old not need any of these guardrails? Frontier model’s failure modes are a direct refutation of claims that we’ve reached (or will soon reach) the artificial general intelligence. We may have reached an artificial general intelligence, but there may be more complexity to this than even AI thought leaders are talking / influencing about. Maybe not all AGIs have a path to digital singularity. Maybe our current era of intelligence modeling has fundamental flaws and we are in a local minimum of the artificial intelligence space. To note, I would bet with a good amount of certainty that we have enough compute power and automation to DDOS the internet out of existence with botnets. That doesn’t make the frontier models intelligent, that just makes their handlers reckless.
- trio8453 29d ago> Why does a 6 year old not need any of these guardrails? They're not guardrails, they're a different input/output environment.
- solenoid0937 29d agoAsk a 6 year old to draw a chess board from scratch every turn and they too will make mistakes.
- datsci_est_2015 29d agoA 6 year old will figure out how to ask you to help them after they get it wrong.
- 29d ago
- meowface 29d agoLuna is one of the budget lower-end last generation models. It'd be useful to at least try to verify the present before being bearish about the future. For OpenAI, the best publicly available model is GPT-6 Astra with XHigh or Max reasoning, and for Anthropic it's Claude Fable 5.1 with XHigh or Max reasoning.
- XMPPwocky 29d agoout of curiosity, do you think fable would get this right? (I'm not sure myself, and haven't tried yet.)
- zahlman 29d agoElsewhere in the thread there are reports of Astra on xhigh playing at what I would characterize broadly as a competent casual level, at least given occasional prodding (which a human of that skill level would basically only require when trying to play unreasonably quickly). There seems to be a pattern (even after correcting for relative ELO systems that aren't calibrated) of the LLM bots demonstrating stronger play against traditional bots than against humans.