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Notes -
The reason I said "if you instruct Claude to use the programming env" is that Claude will generally do things similar to those that were evaluated well in the past, and most chess-like-evals would have forbidden tool use or anything else that human players wouldn't consider "fair play". I expect "always consider what tools you have available and make use of them where it makes sense unless explicitly told not to" in your user instructions will work so that you just never run into this in practice.
Bluntly, I don't think it matters how the board state is represented, as long as the answer isn't "Claude is trying to reconstruct the entire board state from the move sequence".
FWIW I tried the prompt
and Opus 4.7, at various points in the opening, dumped a snapshot of the board state into the chat.
Not playing the full game because Claude spent 20 minutes thinking and writing janky minmax code after blundering before hitting the compaction limit then erroring out, then on the second attempt spent another 15 minutes thinking and almost hit the compaction limit but you can see that it does in fact use tools.
Anyway, to answer the question:
The AI has no memory. Every conversation is a fresh new world. As a rule of thumb, I expect AI to significantly outperform me at anything I've never done before, but that for any task that hasn't been the subject of absurd amounts of RL (and some tasks that have), I'll very quickly be able to identify the places that AI is likely to fail and steer it around those pitfalls. Because I can learn, and the AI can't.
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