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Yud seemed to say LLMs could play chess and therefore could reason. However, the games I've see it play it has tried to make illegal moves which seems to indicate its just pattern matching and the pattern matching breaks down in some spots. of course maybe reasoning is just pattern matching and the LLMs aren't good at it yet or the LLM hasn't been trained on enough chess games. i guess chess players would also say chess is heavily about pattern matching but it also involves some kind of explicit reasoning to double check lines.
After your comment I tried myself to make chatGPT play chess against stockfish. Telling it to write 2 paragraphs of game analysis before trying to make the next move significantly improved the results. Telling it to output 5 good chess moves and explain the reasoning behind them before choosing the real move also improves results. So does rewriting the entire history of the game in each prompt. But even with all of this, it gets confused about the board state towards the midgame, it tries to capture pieces that aren't there, or move pieces that were already captured.
The two fundamental problems are the lack of long term memory (the point of making it write paragraphs of game analysis is to give it time to think), and the fact that it basically perpetually assumes that its past outputs are correct. Like, it will make a mistake in its explanation and mention that a queen was captured when in fact it wasn't, and thereafter it will assume that the queen was in fact captured in all future outputs. All the chess analysis it was trained on did not contain mistakes, so when it generates its own mistaken chess analysis it still assumes it didn't make mistakes and takes all its hallucinations as the truth.
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That's the funniest thing I've seen in a while.
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A human who learned chess almost entirely from ASCII, and then played games entirely in chess notation with no board, would also have trouble not making illegal moves.
(Without any tree search.)
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