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Well the claim I was responding to is that LLMs MUST be modelling chess, because otherwise they would not be able to make legal moves at a rate better than chance. This claim pretty clearly seems to be incorrect.
Beyond that, I don't really understand your point. Here's an example to show what I mean:
There used to be these books you could buy, I think they were called "Informers." They contained records of all IM or higher level chess games for some time period. In theory, you could buy a set of them and have a big library of Informers. Ok, suppose you are playing postal chess with someone and you observe that they make a series of legal moves. Most likely, the person has a chess board set up in their house which they are using to analyze the game. Possibly, they have no chessboard set up and they are just looking up similar games in the Informers and playing whatever moves most masters played in similar positions.
So regardless of whether you are playing a human or playing an LLM, it's potentially possible for your opponent to make legal moves, even a series of legal moves, without modeling the game.
In my non-expert view, LLMs don't create sophisticated models the way humans do. Perhaps chess isn't the best example of this since there was no chess in the ancestral environment. But they definitely can and do create rudimentary models and I think that there's a good chance this will improve a lot in the future.
I don't know that, but I'm certainly willing to agree that's potentially possible. That's basically how the LLM modeled the simple game I had invented for purposes of testing it. Once it started doing creating a rudimentary model along these lines, it stopped making illegal moves.
By not modeling chess. I mean, even if one allows that an LLM can set up a rudimentary model along the lines you describe, it's not carved into stone anywhere that they must do so.
I genuinely don't understand what we're talking about anymore. It's not carved into stone that a human must set up a rudimentary model to play a game of chess either. Is there any distinction, in your view, between LLMs and humans in the chess scenario?
Agreed. Let me ask you this: Now that you understand what I meant with the word "database," do you disagree with anything I have said?
Yes, as far as I know, at the moment humans are capable of making and using more sophisticated models of chess than are LLMs. (To the extent that LLMs are capable of making models along the lines you described.)
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