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Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

Just from a personal layman's perspective: I find being able to reason about chess moves a fair way to measure a specific type of reasoning. The fact that LLMs aren't good at this show to me that they're doing something else which to me is equally disappointing as it is _interesting_.

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I am exactly 1600 at chess.com rating and though I don't do puzzle's much , what I do know is that if you push the white king to b2 then that pawn is losing , take that pawn and then you have 2 bishop endgame which is really really hard .

I once had a bishop and a knight endgame , I think It became draw on repetition.

Asking AI to do this is definitely flawed. This isn't reasoning. From what I know of 2 bishop end game , its more of hey lets trap the king in a box untill you could then snipe the king with your bishop (like his king could be on h1) yours on h3 your 1 bishop targeting g1 and the other bishop anywhere on the main diagonal with no other pieces.

But this is very much stalematey , since I am currently pondering how to get to this position without a stalemate! , if you move the bishop later , its stalement , Like seriously. https://www.chess.com/forum/view/endgames/two-bishop-checkma...

Just search 2 bishop checkmate is hard , a lot of guides exist just for this purpose , though in my 1000+ games I rarely got once or twice 2 bishop endgame , usually bishop or knight which is just as tricky or if I recall , the worst is knight and knight.

But there is a reasoning (see my reply above): winning is not possible (only the queen is strong enough against two bishops), so draw should be the goal. And underpromoting to knight is only way to keep the piece for another move while still promoting.

its actually surprising how many difficult puzzles can be solved by a very small look ahead and playing the only move that doesn't lose. i've even seen strong GM solve puzzles like this. this is especially useful when the first move in the puzzle is very clear but there might be 5 or 6 reasonable candidate moves in reply and its just a waste of time to compute each variation.

Replying to your other questions: Its been a while since I played chess regularly (in a chess club), but:

Two bishops (of different colour) is actually not that difficult. There are some simple heuristics to help you there (an LLM might actually tell you these, haven’t asked;-0)

Bishop+Knight is, in my opinion slightly more complicated, there are some ‘tricks’ necessary to keep the king from running from one courner to the next.

Bishop+bishop is - in most situations - a draw (you need three knights to mate).

oh I didn't knew bishop + bishop is draw in most situations. Sorry mate!

Also I am not sure , I thought that we were playing as white , but are we playing as black ?

Humans can also be disappointing and interesting. I like to do Lichess puzzles not logged in, which mostly gives puzzles with a Lichess puzzle ratings in the 1400-1600 range with some going down to around 1200 or up to the 1700s. Presumably that is the range the average Lichess player is in.

For those who have not used Lichess, the puzzles it gives (unless you ask for a specific type) do not tell you what the goal is (mate, win material, get a winning endgame, save a bad position, etc) or how many moves it will take.

Here are some puzzles it has recently given me and their current ratings. These all have something in common.

  1492 https://lichess.org/training/KsrR0
  1506 https://lichess.org/training/RwLfy
  1545 https://lichess.org/training/TzZdx
  1557 https://lichess.org/training/IJfT7
  1564 https://lichess.org/training/oOMz4
  1604 https://lichess.org/training/uRRck
  1661 https://lichess.org/training/jBrLX
  1719 https://lichess.org/training/cpKAM

What they have in common is that they are all mate in one. I have seen composed mate in ones that puzzled even high rated players, but they involved something unusual like the mating move was an en passant capture.

None of the above puzzles are tricks like that.

So how are enough people failing them for their ratings to be that high?

i assume lichess has time based puzzles so people can be failing the puzzles because they are trying to optimize how many puzzles they solve rather than making no mistakes. also, i suspect lichess puzzle ratings probably do not match with lichess chess ratings (sure, they probably correlate but i suspect there could easily be a +200 average difference or something like that between them) . i can solve puzzles consistently at least 1000 rating higher on chess.com than my chess.com rapid rating. also, if you know these puzzles are mate in 1 then they are much easier. i'm guessing you didn't know when you initially solved them but i think its much harder for other people to judge the difficulty of these puzzles if they know the solution is mate in 1.

Lichess does have some puzzle modes that are timed, such as Puzzle Storm where you try to see how many puzzles you can solve in a fixed time, but their puzzle rating system doesn't take into account puzzles used in the timed modes.

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