[HN Gopher] Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess
        
       Author : crescit_eundo
       Score  : 57 points
       Date   : 2024-11-14 17:05 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (dynomight.substack.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (dynomight.substack.com)
        
       | PaulHoule wrote:
       | Maybe that one which plays chess well is calling out to a real
       | chess engine.
        
         | singularity2001 wrote:
         | this possibility is discussed in the article and deemed
         | unlikely
        
           | margalabargala wrote:
           | I don't see that discussed, could you quote it?
        
           | probably_wrong wrote:
           | Note: the possibility is not mentioned in the article but
           | rather in the comments [1]. I had to click a bit to see it.
           | 
           | The fact that the one closed source model is the only one
           | that plays well seems to me like a clear case of the
           | interface doing some of the work. If you ask ChatGPT to count
           | until 10000 (something that most LLMs can't do for known
           | reasons) you get an answer that's clearly pre-programmed. I'm
           | sure the same is happening here (and with many, many other
           | tasks) - the author argues against it by saying "but why
           | isn't it better?", which doesn't seem like the best argument:
           | I can imagine that typical ChatGPT users enjoy the product
           | more if they have a chance to win once in a while.
           | 
           | [1] https://dynomight.substack.com/p/chess/comment/77190852
        
         | sobriquet9 wrote:
         | This is likely. From example games, it not only knows the rules
         | (which would be impressive by itself, just making the legal
         | moves is not trivial). It also has some planning capabilities
         | (plays combinations of several moves).
        
       | pseudosavant wrote:
       | LLMs aren't really language models so much as they are token
       | models. That is how they can also handle input in audio or visual
       | forms because there is an audio or visual tokenizer. If you can
       | make it a token, the model will try to predict the following
       | ones.
       | 
       | Even though I'm sure chess matches were used in some of the LLM
       | training, I'd bet a model trained just for chess would do far
       | better.
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42138276
        
       | digging wrote:
       | Definitely weird results, but I feel there are too many variables
       | to learn much from it. A couple things:
       | 
       | 1. The author mentioned that tokenization causes something
       | minuscule like a a " " at the end of the input to shatter the
       | model's capabilities. Is it possible other slightly different
       | formatting changes in the input could raise capabilities?
       | 
       | 2. Temperature was 0.7 for all models. What if it wasn't? Isn't
       | there a chance one more more models would perform significantly
       | better with higher or lower temperatures?
       | 
       | Maybe I just don't understand this stuff very well, but it feels
       | like this post is only 10% of the work needed to get any meaning
       | from this...
        
       | azeirah wrote:
       | Maybe I'm really stupid... but perhaps if we want really
       | intelligent models we need to stop tokenizing at all? We're
       | literally limiting what a model can see and how it percieves the
       | world by limiting the structure of the information streams that
       | come into the model from the very beginning.
       | 
       | I know working with raw bits or bytes is slower, but it should be
       | relatively cheap and easy to at least falsify this hypothesis
       | that many huge issues might be due to tokenization problems
       | but... yeah.
       | 
       | Surprised I don't see more research into radicaly different
       | tokenization.
        
         | cschep wrote:
         | How would we train it? Don't we need it to understand the heaps
         | and heaps of data we already have "tokenized" e.g. the
         | internet? Written words for humans? Genuinely curious how we
         | could approach it differently?
        
           | viraptor wrote:
           | That's not what tokenized means here. Parent is asking to
           | provide the model with separate characters rather than
           | tokens, i.e. groups of characters.
        
       | DrNosferatu wrote:
       | What about contemporary frontier models?
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-11-14 23:00 UTC)