this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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Then the actual chess isn't LLM. If you are going stockfish, then the LLM doesn't add anything, stockfish is doing everything.
The whole point is the marketing rage is that LLMs can do all kinds of stuff, doubling down on this with the branding of some approaches as "reasoning" models, which are roughly "similar to 'pre-reasoning', but forcing use of more tokens on disposable intermediate generation steps". With this facet of LLM marketing, the promise would be that the LLM can "reason" itself through a chess game without particular enablement. In practice, people trying to feed in gobs of chess data to an LLM end up with an LLM that doesn't even comply to the rules of the game, let alone provide reasonable competitive responses to an oppone.
And neither did the Atari 2600 win against ChatGPT. Whatever game they ran on it did.
That's my point here. The fact that neither Atari 2600 nor ChatGPT are capable of playing chess on their own. They can only do so if you provide them with the necessary tools. Which applies to both of them. Yet only one of them was given those tools here.
Fine, a chess engine that is capable of running with affordable even for the time 1970s electronics will best what marketing folks would have you think is an arbitrarily capable "reasoning" model running on top of the line 2025 hardware.
You can split hairs about "well actually, the 2600 is hardware and a chess engine is the software" but everyone gets the point.
As to assertions that no one should expect an LLM to be a chess engine, well tell that to the industry that is asserting the LLMs are now "reasoning" and provides a basis to replace most of the labor pool. We need stories like this to calibrate expectations in a way common people can understand..