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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   24600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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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?

I think we agree that LLMs learn from seeing chess games. I don't agree that LLMs aren't modeling chess at all - there seems to be no evidence for this. A thinking trace of a chess game with an LLM would certainly show the LLM trying to think about possible moves and evaluating their trade offs, even in the absence of a game board that it uses to keep state. I'm sure they are more likely to make mistakes if they aren't keeping track of the board, but so are humans.

To be honest, I'm not sure what kind of evidence would change your mind here if existing thinking traces are not enough. Anthropic researchers found that models are doing complex modeling for tasks as simple as deciding when to start a new line when writing text. Looking into a model to really understand how it's modeling something as complicated as a chess game would require a research budget.

Edit: there was a dude who trained a small model on next token prediction and found that it maintains a board state internally. So I guess now we can put this to bed?

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.)

Sure, in the sense that good human players can beat LLMs at chess. That said, the best models play at a class C level and do significantly better than the average chess.com player, which I think is hard to explain away by appealing to the models having memorized a bunch of openings.

I don't agree that LLMs aren't modeling chess at all - there seems to be no evidence for this.

The fact that they (allegedly) regularly make illegal moves is evidence of it.

To be honest, I'm not sure what kind of evidence would change your mind here if existing thinking traces are not enough.

One thing that would change my mind is if LLMs regularly and accurately solved problems which require modeling. For example, the (fresh) carwash puzzle.

The fact that they (allegedly) regularly make illegal moves is evidence of it.

It really depends on the model. Some of them don't make illegal moves, or at least do so rarely.

It really depends on the model. Some of them don't make illegal moves, or at least do so rarely.

Certainly if LLMs started (verifiably) playing perfect chess in the sense of never making illegal moves, I would accept as evidence that they are creating chess models.

If an LLM made illegal moves only rarely, I'm not sure what I'd make of it.

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