How to Build a Chess Engine and Fail

Why build a chess engine these days, just use an LLM?

LLMs are quite bad at chess actually, even compared to human players -- and certainly compared to proper modern chess engines

They usually struggle to always generate valid moves.

And that's pivotal.

If you have a program which always makes valid moves and gives up when it has lost you wrote a proper chess playing program. It may play badly, but it plays.

That could now be achieved by precomputing all valid moves and using outlines[0] or Structured Outputs[1] to constrain the output.

[0]: https://github.com/dottxt-ai/outlines

[1]: https://openai.com/index/introducing-structured-outputs-in-t...