Researchers asked frontier models to play chess. Have a look at the MAR rates in Table 3. When not explicitly told which moves were legal, no model identified legal moves at a rate better than 80%. Many asked for more illegal moves than legal moves. And even when explicitly told which moves were legal, the models continued to ask for illegal moves. With illegal asks discarded, none of the bots could beat a chess model calibrated to 1100 ELO.
The author of the originating post says that "current frontier models need laborious oversight and guardrails on even the simplest tasks", and he's absolutely correct.
> Gemini 2.5 Pro, O3, Claude Sonnet 3.7 and ChatGPT 4.1
The gap in capabilities between those models which they tested, and actual current frontier ones is enormous. I would not trust that any conclusions they made are applicable.
I tested both myself and a weak bot against Astra xhigh, <a href="https://lichess.org/study/27lCQqDa" rel="nofollow">https://lichess.org/study/27lCQqDa. It's still pretty bad at chess, though it takes longer to devolve into illegal moves.
So you weren't giving it an updated board state after every move? If you want to compare apples to apples, it should give an updated board state for each move, or you should play blindfolded.
Blindfolded flex by OP aside (I can barely play when seeing the board), considering reasoning traces and their nature, if we want to be fair, a person would have to get the moves, but be allowed to write them down or draw up a board in their notepad. My working memory can barely handle five chunks, a models reasoning tokens are masses of written text in comparison.
carodgers · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://arxiv.org/html/2509.24239v4" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/html/2509.24239v4
Researchers asked frontier models to play chess. Have a look at the MAR rates in Table 3. When not explicitly told which moves were legal, no model identified legal moves at a rate better than 80%. Many asked for more illegal moves than legal moves. And even when explicitly told which moves were legal, the models continued to ask for illegal moves. With illegal asks discarded, none of the bots could beat a chess model calibrated to 1100 ELO.
The author of the originating post says that "current frontier models need laborious oversight and guardrails on even the simplest tasks", and he's absolutely correct.
joefourier · · focus · HN ↗
> Gemini 2.5 Pro, O3, Claude Sonnet 3.7 and ChatGPT 4.1
The gap in capabilities between those models which they tested, and actual current frontier ones is enormous. I would not trust that any conclusions they made are applicable.
sobellian · · focus · HN ↗
hackinthebochs · · focus · HN ↗
Topfi · · focus · HN ↗