this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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It's fucking insane it couldn't keep track of a board...
And it's concerning how confident it is that it will work, because the idiots asking it stuff will believe it. It'll keep failing and keep saying next time will work, because it's built to maximize engagement.
Spatial reasoning has always been a weakness of LLMs. Other symptoms include the inability to count and no concept of object permanence.
Yeah, but it's chess...
The LLM doesn't have to imagine a board, if you feed it the rules of chess and the dimensions of the board it should be able to "play in its head".
For a human to have that kind of working memory would be a genius level intellect and years of practice at the game.
But human working memory is shit compared to virtually every other animal. This and processing speed is supposed to be AI's main draw.
LLMs can be good at openings. Not because it is thinking through the rules or planning strategies, but because opening moves are likely in most general training data from various sources. It's copying the most probable reaction to your move, based on lots of documentation. This can of course break down when you stray from a typical play style, as it has less to choose from in the options of probability, and only a few moves in there won't be any more since there's a huge number of possible moves.
I.e., there's no calculations involved. When you play a LLM at chess, you're playing a list of common moves in history.
An even simpler example would be to tell the LLM that its last move was illegal. Even knowing the rules you just told it, it will agree and take it back. This comes from being trained to give satisfying replies to a human prompt.