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Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess

(dynomight.substack.com)
688 points crescit_eundo | 1 comments | 14 Nov 24 17:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.366s | source
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niobe ◴[15 Nov 24 00:40 UTC] No.42142885[source]▶
I don't understand why educated people expect that an LLM would be able to play chess at a decent level.

It has no idea about the quality of it's data. "Act like x" prompts are no substitute for actual reasoning and deterministic computation which clearly chess requires.

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1. danielmarkbruce ◴[15 Nov 24 01:33 UTC] No.42143136[source]▶
Chess does not clearly require that. Various purely ML/statistical based model approaches are doing pretty well. It's almost certainly best to incorporate some kind of search into an overall system, but it's not absolutely required to play just decent amateur level.

The problem here is the specific model architecture, training data, vocabulary/tokenization method (if you were going to even represent a game this way... which you wouldn't), loss function and probably decoding strategy.... basically everything is wrong here.