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Comment by stjo | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but this is (one of?) the first pieces of software that plays chess, without being programmed to do so. It picked up the patterns, just like it picked up writing poetry.

I doubt such approach will beat classical purpose-made engines anytime soon, but that’s not the point.

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>> Yes, but this is (one of?) the first pieces of software that plays chess, without being programmed to do so.

Wasn't it? There are large databases of chess games recorded in textual format on the internet, and ChatGPT's language model was trained to reproduce text found on the internet.

Besides, I thought enthusiasm about large language models performing in tasks that they weren't directly trained on, peaked with BERT, back in 2018. I guess they just didn't hype it enough then so most people think it's something new. Or is that not the point?

I share adam(above)s assessment that bing has (most likely) to be connected to an external chess program. The extra work of getting a language model adhere to the rules seems highly implausible. At the very very least to check if moves are legal.

I'm not really sure I see the point? Surely this is both more resource intensive and worse than a chess AI.

The goal isn't to use this to replace existing chess AI's, but to show how just a language model is able to perform a non-language related task very well. Also not only does it play correct moves (at a lower skill level than a proper chess AI), it is able to explain and justify it's move choice.

It's not of practical use. The point would be understanding the nature of ChatGPT.

The point is that it is providing an unexpected and novel behavior in spite of having zero programming to produce this kind of output. It's odd and almost implies a kind of self-awareness to "understand" the rules to a complicated game, and then use logic to predict what is an optimal move. Even though it's only defined input being an incredible amount of text from across the internet.

Is it going to be a good chess player? Not really. But likewise, a dog will never be a great basketball player; but if one manages to somehow get onto a team and demonstrate competency with the fundamentals and team play then I will be impressed too.

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