ChatGPT "Absolutely Wrecked" at Chess by Atari 2600 Console From 1977

Despite all its advances, ChatGPT is seemingly still less smart — at certain tasks, at least — than an Atari game console from almost 50 years ago.

In a post on LinkedIn, Citrix software engineer Robert Caruso explained how the OpenAI chatbot "got absolutely wrecked" by an Atari 2600 running Atari Chess, a game for the system released in 1979, when Jimmy Carter was still president.

Launched in 1977, the Atari 2600 — also marketed at the time as the Atari Video Computer System — popularized at-home gaming after Atari released its "Pong" console two years prior. Still, that system was released some 21 years after the MANIAC I supercomputer became the first machine in history to defeat a human at modified chess, so you'd think that after another few decades, our cutting-edge tech would destroy the primordial Atari.

Apparently, that wasn't the case.

"ChatGPT got absolutely wrecked on the beginner level," Caruso wrote. "This was after a conversation we had regarding the history of AI in Chess which led to it volunteering to play Atari Chess. It wanted to find out how quickly it could beat a game that only thinks 1-2 moves ahead."

Although the chatbot had been given a "baseline board" to learn the game and identify pieces, it kept mixing up rooks and bishops, misread moves, and "repeatedly lost track" of where its pieces were. To make matters worse, as Caruso explained, ChatGPT also blamed Atari's icons for being "too abstract to recognize" — but when he switched the game over to standard notation, it didn't perform any better.

For an hour-and-a-half, ChatGPT "made enough blunders to get laughed out of a 3rd grade chess club" while insisting over and over again that it would win "if we just started over," Caruso noted. (And yes, it's kind of creepy that the chatbot apparently referred to itself and the human it was interfacing with as "we.")

"Meanwhile, Atari’s humble 8-bit engine just did its thing," the engineer noted. "No language model. No flash. Just brute-force board evaluation and 1977 stubbornness."

Unfortunately, we don't have any video of Caruso's gameplay setup to watch ChatGPT get destroyed by a nearly 50-year-old AI — but at least we get to laugh at the idea of the chatbot's lack of gaming prowess.

More on moronic chatbots: Therapy Chatbot Tells Recovering Addict to Have a Little Meth as a Treat

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