I’m pretty sure you can write a simple tree search based program that plays better than 90% of humans, sheerly by crunching numbers quickly. I’m sure you wouldn’t claim that that program “understands” chess in the way a human does.

Of course it’s a different question as to how exactly do humans understand chess.

I personally don’t believe humans have some sort of “special” intelligence, whatever we do must be computable and therefore doable by a computer. It’s just that todays LLMs don’t seem to be it.