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WhitneyLandtoday at 12:00 AM4 repliesview on HN

1. It’s hard to trust a 2026 paper that’s showing results for such old models.

2. Chess seems to be a poor benchmark for generalized strategic reasoning. People who are good at it rely more on experience and deep domain expertise than on skills that generalize to make them experts at unrelated tasks.

3. The study sounds like proving humans will never fly because they don’t have wings. In reality, humans do fly, and Claude Fable would destroy any human at chess by coding a strong enough engine on the fly.


Replies

manquertoday at 12:06 AM

> People who are good at it rely more on experience and deep domain expertise

People are good are 1900 or 2100 above and the top ones who spend decades in the field i.e. deep expertise are well in the 2200-2700 range.

A 1100 player is none of these things, they are purely relying on strategic reasoning there is a good chance they cannot name a single opening or articulate clearly why a move was appropriate. 1100 is quite low bar.

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paimapitoday at 1:18 AM

so prove it! get a public repo out there, have it play against some open source engines

also I think the operative letter in AGI is the G - and if the G is short for 'variably competent savant-like hyperfocus on certain kinds of software coding and not any other general skill' then its not really G at all, is it?

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carodgerstoday at 1:30 AM

> Claude Fable would destroy any human at chess by coding a strong enough engine on the fly.

A bash script can clone and build stockfish, feed in human moves, and reply. By your standard, this bash script would "destroy any human at chess."

Are you interested in assessing the intelligence of the model, or the intelligence of the tools the model can use?

whattoday at 12:47 AM

> Claude Fable would destroy any human at chess by coding a strong enough engine on the fly.

Delusional, but then Claude fable also isn’t beating any human at chess, the engine is.