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willmarchtoday at 12:40 AM2 repliesview on HN

If you gave a human a book or two on chess they would not become a decent player (they would be closer to 500-600 than 1100 ELO) and they would only get better after playing hundreds or thousands of games (often making illegal moves and moves that violate the rules of chess as they learn).

Your assumptions/intuition about generic human intelligence feels quite incorrect, considering LLMs currently play better than a brand new human player would (presumably without any attempt to fine tune them specific on chess, such as playing thousands of games).


Replies

rsferntoday at 2:41 AM

the discussion isn’t really about whether language models can become strong chess players though, the point is they seem to struggle to consistently make valid moves. Most humans don’t need to read two books to pick that up, just a couple lines of basic instructions

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whattoday at 1:08 AM

> considering LLMs currently play better than a brand new human player would

They’ve ingested all the literature on playing chess, a brand new human player has not.

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