[Windows Central] Copilot and ChatGPT went against a 4 KB Atari chess game from the 70s — with an embarrassing effort from Microsoft's AI

Topher

Identifies as young
Despite promising "a strong fight", Microsoft's golden AI chatbot couldn't even remember the chessboard state.


Citrix engineer Robert Caruso recently posted on LinkedIn about testing both Microsoft's Copilot chatbot and ChatGPT against an Atari chess game from the 1970s — a challenge that left the 46-year-old, 4 KB Atari 2600 Video Chess game undefeated against modern Artificial Intelligence.

According to Caruso, the decision to pit ChatGPT against an Atari-built "AI" was born from a conversation with the chatbot regarding the differences in the open-source chess engine Stockfish and the program AlphaZero. The conversation took a turn, Caruso shared, when ChatGPT's chatbot claimed it was "a strong player in its own right and would easily beat Atari's Video Chess."

So, the engineer set up a game of chess in the Atari 2600 Video Chess game, originally released in 1979, via the Stella emulator. During the match-up, ChatGPT confused the game pieces and lost track of the board state, even with assistance from Caruso correcting board awareness in a 90-minute match that ultimately led to the chatbot's defeat at the beginner level. Not a great start.

The battle between humans, AI, and the game of chess has been raging on since the late 90s, when an IBM Deep Blue supercomputer defeated the Russian chess grandmaster and former World Chess Champion, Garry Kasparov.

It was only natural that Caruso couldn't stop with a failed match between ChatGPT and Atari. He decided to repeat the experiment with Microsoft's golden child, Copilot. "Imagine everyone's head exploding if a MICROSOFT product outperformed ChatGPT," Caruso wrote.

He repeated the beginning of the experiment with Microsoft's Copilot AI, the same as he had with ChatGPT, by having a pre-game "conversation" with the chatbot. Copilot reportedly claimed it could keep track of the board, unlike ChatGPT, but once Caruso asked Microsoft's chatbot to render the board as it imagined it, the reality of the match became clearer.

Copilot's board was different from the previous screenshot Caruso had fed into it.



Despicable Me Lol GIF
 
Grok would win and blame the Jews.
More like would lose and shout that if Adolf Hitler was there he would have flipped the table on those dirty piecegrabber semites because White always starts and so should end winning, but it's all a conspiracy towards White Genocide.

(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
 
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Well, LLMs can claim they understand the trade market better than a human but I wouldn't put my money on their predictions. I played chess against ChatGPT a year ago and by move 9 already lost track of the pieces.
 
It'll get there. This is the early days of AI really.

I don't get why people hate AI.

Okay, so I'm a dude, right? I am somewhat smart and I actually have some interesting ideas for games, books, movies, things that you would probably enjoy but I have no outlet right? I will never in my life have a way to draw anything. To paint anything. To make a game. I'll never have that because I don't have the skills, the tools, the licenses. So my creative ideas are locked away in my head and they will die there, slowly rotting into nothingness.

Then comes AI. AI allows people with ideas to see them come to life without needing a billion dollar studio, or even training on how to bring ideas to life. AI simply listens to my inputs and creates what I tell it, bringing my imagination to life where I can now share it with the world. It can do that for movies, games, paintings, books, even medicine eventually.

So before you hate AI because somebody might lose a job, imagine those ideas dying in our heads and how "stopping" AI will actually hinder us and our children from bringing our dreams to life. Right now only billion dollar studios can bring dreams to life. Wouldn't it be better if any one of us could make the next AAA banger with just ideas in our head? Wouldn't that be an absolute win for humanity even if we no longer needed the billion dollar studio?
 
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I noticed that AI fails HARD if you put it in a situation that requires creativity. It just cannot think outside the box. It cannot create good, original art, tell interesting stories or think of novel strategies. it sticks to the tried and true.
 
Right now only billion dollar studios can bring dreams to life

And nightmares
 
It'll get there. This is the early days of AI really.

I don't get why people hate AI.

Okay, so I'm a dude, right? I am somewhat smart and I actually have some interesting ideas for games, books, movies, things that you would probably enjoy but I have no outlet right? I will never in my life have a way to draw anything. To paint anything. To make a game. I'll never have that because I don't have the skills, the tools, the licenses. So my creative ideas are locked away in my head and they will die there, slowly rotting into nothingness.

Then comes AI. AI allows people with ideas to see them come to life without needing a billion dollar studio, or even training on how to bring ideas to life. AI simply listens to my inputs and creates what I tell it, bringing my imagination to life where I can now share it with the world. It can do that for movies, games, paintings, books, even medicine eventually.

So before you hate AI because somebody might lose a job, imagine those ideas dying in our heads and how "stopping" AI will actually hinder us and our children from bringing our dreams to life. Right now only billion dollar studios can bring dreams to life. Wouldn't it be better if any one of us could make the next AAA banger with just ideas in our head? Wouldn't that be an absolute win for humanity even if we no longer needed the billion dollar studio?

And the result of that is we'll have 100x the amount of content, and it will all be samey because it was created with AI tools. Hence "AI slop". While it will allow you as a creative person to output something you otherwise wouldn't have (positive), it means all of the various markets for content will be flooded with this stuff (negative). Then it becomes more difficult for people to sort through the larger volume of content to find the top 1% (or 0.1%, or 0.01%) that they would spend money on. Because people want to spend money on the best content, this then incentivizes content creators to employ bots to download, stream, like, subscribe, share, etc. to try and build hype for their content, which further dilutes those metrics and makes it even harder for people to search out and find the cream of the crop.

The very value that AI brings - brain power of all forms at run-away scale - is exactly the attribute that ruins the ecosystem for the consumers of this information.

Ultimately, I'm fine with the idea that we can't extract all the creativity at all the various levels of quality from humans. I'm fine with the idea that only a small percentage of people are able to complete all of the tasks and steps needed to have their value put out into the world. Lowering the barriers to entry to almost zero seems like it's going to do a lot more damage to the ecosystem than having some significant form of gatekeeping.
 
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I noticed that AI fails HARD if you put it in a situation that requires creativity. It just cannot think outside the box. It cannot create good, original art, tell interesting stories or think of novel strategies. it sticks to the tried and true.
this will never change and cannot change, art is a reflection of the soul and AI is soulless by definition.

Just think, when generative Ai came out, how quickly were people able to figure out AI slop art, AI slop writing, etc. It was maybe a couple weeks. Now we can all spot it a mile away, even though the models have ostensibly been improving and iterating over that time.
 
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Ultimately, I'm fine with the idea that we can't extract all the creativity at all the various levels of quality from humans. I'm fine with the idea that only a small percentage of people are able to complete all of the tasks and steps needed to have their value put out into the world. Lowering the barriers to entry to almost zero seems like it's going to do a lot more damage to the ecosystem than having some significant form of gatekeeping.

Well said. I was trying to type up a response to this but couldn't get it just right but this says exactly what I want to say. I have more than enough content to play right now I'm overwhelmed.
 
It'll get there. This is the early days of AI really.

I don't get why people hate AI.

Okay, so I'm a dude, right? I am somewhat smart and I actually have some interesting ideas for games, books, movies, things that you would probably enjoy but I have no outlet right? I will never in my life have a way to draw anything. To paint anything. To make a game. I'll never have that because I don't have the skills, the tools, the licenses. So my creative ideas are locked away in my head and they will die there, slowly rotting into nothingness.

Then comes AI. AI allows people with ideas to see them come to life without needing a billion dollar studio, or even training on how to bring ideas to life. AI simply listens to my inputs and creates what I tell it, bringing my imagination to life where I can now share it with the world. It can do that for movies, games, paintings, books, even medicine eventually.

So before you hate AI because somebody might lose a job, imagine those ideas dying in our heads and how "stopping" AI will actually hinder us and our children from bringing our dreams to life. Right now only billion dollar studios can bring dreams to life. Wouldn't it be better if any one of us could make the next AAA banger with just ideas in our head? Wouldn't that be an absolute win for humanity even if we no longer needed the billion dollar studio?
 
It'll get there. This is the early days of AI really.

I don't get why people hate AI.

Okay, so I'm a dude, right? I am somewhat smart and I actually have some interesting ideas for games, books, movies, things that you would probably enjoy but I have no outlet right? I will never in my life have a way to draw anything. To paint anything. To make a game. I'll never have that because I don't have the skills, the tools, the licenses. So my creative ideas are locked away in my head and they will die there, slowly rotting into nothingness.

Then comes AI. AI allows people with ideas to see them come to life without needing a billion dollar studio, or even training on how to bring ideas to life. AI simply listens to my inputs and creates what I tell it, bringing my imagination to life where I can now share it with the world. It can do that for movies, games, paintings, books, even medicine eventually.

So before you hate AI because somebody might lose a job, imagine those ideas dying in our heads and how "stopping" AI will actually hinder us and our children from bringing our dreams to life. Right now only billion dollar studios can bring dreams to life. Wouldn't it be better if any one of us could make the next AAA banger with just ideas in our head? Wouldn't that be an absolute win for humanity even if we no longer needed the billion dollar studio?
AI is not creative. It is imitative. It is nothing more than theft. In its current form, AI will actually lead to a potential dead-end of creativity.

Creatives who rise above their peers to create - that's what actually makes them creatives. They're creatives because they have the skills you lack, whether they worked hard to get them, or are just naturally talented.

AI has no spark of inspiration. Its inspiration comes from the prompts that non-creatives feed it.

And what do non-creatives do with AI? Comb through social media and you'll see: endless trash posts trying to be funny, or clever, and failing miserably at both, but rendered as though someone put a lot of effort into them. It's a bunch of embarrassing schlock. The same five templates cycled around with some variation of the same garbage memejunk, or someone's embarrassing idea of "art" which is usually every bit as "original" as the art assets stolen by the AI to generate the image. Shocker: non-creatives usually cannot create, only imitate.

Put two phones next to each other on speakerphone, then say something. What you'll hear might be recognizable at first, but will quickly degrade into a garbled, nonsensical mess. That is what talentless imitation sounds like. That's what'll happen to every single artform if the talent of true creatives isn't recognized, and the normalization of AI slop continues.

There's a reason why they're pushing to prevent states from regulating AI. A few more years of this and people are really going to be sick of seeing this constant AI slop everywhere, which undermines everything. Talent needs to be a gateway to creative endeavors. If it isn't, it brings down every medium, and people will absolutely stop caring about junk that gets spit out of a prompt. Saying nothing, of course, of the widespread theft AI represents. It's glorified stealing.

This is extremely harmful to society, and needs to be regulated to death. Creatives should not consent to the content of their work being stolen, repurposed, and amalgamized.
 
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AI is not creative. It is imitative. It is nothing more than theft. In its current form, AI will actually lead to a potential dead-end of creativity.

Creatives who rise above their peers to create - that's what actually makes them creatives. They're creatives because they have the skills you lack, whether they worked hard to get them, or are just naturally talented.

AI has no spark of inspiration. Its inspiration comes from the prompts that non-creatives feed it.

And what do non-creatives do with AI? Comb through social media and you'll see: endless trash posts trying to be funny, or clever, and failing miserably at both, but rendered as though someone put a lot of effort into them. It's a bunch of embarrassing schlock. The same five templates cycled around with some variation of the same garbage memejunk, or someone's embarrassing idea of "art" which is usually every bit as "original" as the art assets stolen by the AI to generate the image. Shocker: non-creatives usually cannot create, only imitate.

There's a reason why they're pushing to prevent states from regulating AI. A few more years of this and people are really going to be sick of seeing this constant AI slop everywhere, which undermines everything. Talent needs to be a gateway to creative endeavors. If it isn't, it brings down every medium, and people will absolutely stop caring about junk that gets spit out of a prompt. Saying nothing, of course, of the widespread theft AI represents. It's glorified stealing.

This is extremely harmful to society, and needs to be regulated to death. Creatives should not consent to the content of their work being stolen, repurposed, and amalgamized.
Yea, remember when that Ai came out and you could generate Ghibli style art with it? It got old within a couple days because people were putting out endless Ghibli slop. Lost in all of this was the fact that this computer was approprating a legitimate and beautiful style of art developed over decades by some of the most skilled artists and animators of the past 100 years and found a way to make it cheap and tacky.
 
I can't find context on what CoPilot is being used vs what ChatGPT model is being used

CoPilot went the orchestration route. I can simply have CoPilot use OpenAI's o3 model and get the same results.
 
It'll get there. This is the early days of AI really.

I don't get why people hate AI.

Okay, so I'm a dude, right? I am somewhat smart and I actually have some interesting ideas for games, books, movies, things that you would probably enjoy but I have no outlet right? I will never in my life have a way to draw anything. To paint anything. To make a game. I'll never have that because I don't have the skills, the tools, the licenses. So my creative ideas are locked away in my head and they will die there, slowly rotting into nothingness.

Then comes AI. AI allows people with ideas to see them come to life without needing a billion dollar studio, or even training on how to bring ideas to life. AI simply listens to my inputs and creates what I tell it, bringing my imagination to life where I can now share it with the world. It can do that for movies, games, paintings, books, even medicine eventually.

So before you hate AI because somebody might lose a job, imagine those ideas dying in our heads and how "stopping" AI will actually hinder us and our children from bringing our dreams to life. Right now only billion dollar studios can bring dreams to life. Wouldn't it be better if any one of us could make the next AAA banger with just ideas in our head? Wouldn't that be an absolute win for humanity even if we no longer needed the billion dollar studio?
Just look at Call of Duty for what the future will bring. Endless ai slop, employees being laid off and replaced with ai.

There will be very few jobs that ai can't do. Yours is very likely one of them.
 
I noticed that AI fails HARD if you put it in a situation that requires creativity. It just cannot think outside the box. It cannot create good, original art, tell interesting stories or think of novel strategies. it sticks to the tried and true.
probably rather the opposite, since AI tries everything before getting to adequate solutions, trying even obviously dumb stuff humans with half a brain would not do.
99,9% of artists can't create truly original art. It's mostly copy&paste anyway, AI can do that already better. There were/are very very few really creative individuals that come up with genuinely innovative stuff. And even that will be found by trial and error by AI in the future.

Humans really overestimate themselves and can't comprehend that our brains do kinda the same processes that AI does to learn anything. AI's paths are just different since it is unnatural and has not evolved over thousands of years. AI is in its very infancy, of course it won't outdo us in everything already, but in a few years and people will stop bitching around how bad it is.
 
Yea, remember when that Ai came out and you could generate Ghibli style art with it? It got old within a couple days because people were putting out endless Ghibli slop. Lost in all of this was the fact that this computer was approprating a legitimate and beautiful style of art developed over decades by some of the most skilled artists and animators of the past 100 years and found a way to make it cheap and tacky.
Exactly. It devalues the medium. Creatively-stunted people wrapping up their insipid ideas in a gorgeous, stolen art style - it might not actually be illegal, but it definitely feels wrong. Of course, that's because it is.
 
LLM is not about playing a game, it's about reading/watching-compiling-writing/produce image/video information.
For playing games either separate AI should be used (and there are models for this as IBM demonstrate) or some blocks for this should be incorporated into LLM
Current AIs are not universal, they tailored for specific tasks. Asking them to go out of their specialization is the same as asking 3yo child to do stuff.

AI is not creative. It is imitative. It is nothing more than theft. In its current form, AI will actually lead to a potential dead-end of creativity.
Humans can create new only based on something they already know. So is AI.
 
LLM is not about playing a game, it's about reading/watching-compiling-writing/produce image/video information.
For playing games either separate AI should be used (and there are models for this as IBM demonstrate) or some blocks for this should be incorporated into LLM
Current AIs are not universal, they tailored for specific tasks. Asking them to go out of their specialization is the same as asking 3yo child to do stuff.


Humans can create new only based on something they already know. So is AI.
AI cannot invent. It can only imitate. The spark of inspiration is not something that a data collation system can achieve. So-called "AI" - in its current implementation as a thoroughly-corporate content-generation tool - is not capable of innovation. It is simple, large-scale data-harvesting and reappropriation. That is the depth of its ability and utility.
 
What's the point of this? Chess is not something you can brute force with language.

We have specialized AIs that already beat the best players, not only in chess.

Of course LLM would not fare well.
 
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I'm genuinely curious. As the world's biggest software company . Can MS ever release an actual good piece of software that is decent, works and is bug free?
Every windows release is a mess.
I guess they did a good job with MS word.
 
I'm genuinely curious. As the world's biggest software company . Can MS ever release an actual good piece of software that is decent, works and is bug free?
Every windows release is a mess.
I guess they did a good job with MS word.

Windows 7 and 10 were pretty decent launches. 🤷‍♂️
 
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I'm genuinely curious. As the world's biggest software company . Can MS ever release an actual good piece of software that is decent, works and is bug free?
Every windows release is a mess.
I guess they did a good job with MS word.

Excel is wizardy.

But when they revamped word 10 years ago (or whenever that was) I've hated it since.

The rest of their software is a fucking joke.
 
Co-Pilot is my go-to. I know it shouldn't be, I just like the answers and format I get out of it. Mostly work related stuff. Electrical engineering topics. Also amazing for shopping.
 
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And the result of that is we'll have 100x the amount of content, and it will all be samey because it was created with AI tools. Hence "AI slop". While it will allow you as a creative person to output something you otherwise wouldn't have (positive), it means all of the various markets for content will be flooded with this stuff (negative). Then it becomes more difficult for people to sort through the larger volume of content to find the top 1% (or 0.1%, or 0.01%) that they would spend money on. Because people want to spend money on the best content, this then incentivizes content creators to employ bots to download, stream, like, subscribe, share, etc. to try and build hype for their content, which further dilutes those metrics and makes it even harder for people to search out and find the cream of the crop.

The very value that AI brings - brain power of all forms at run-away scale - is exactly the attribute that ruins the ecosystem for the consumers of this information.

Ultimately, I'm fine with the idea that we can't extract all the creativity at all the various levels of quality from humans. I'm fine with the idea that only a small percentage of people are able to complete all of the tasks and steps needed to have their value put out into the world. Lowering the barriers to entry to almost zero seems like it's going to do a lot more damage to the ecosystem than having some significant form of gatekeeping.
Sorry, several people have chimed in so I'm just going to quote you and answer a couple of those concerns here. Not everything below is a response to something you specifically have said.

1. That's not a negative(bolded), why not let the market decide?
2. "samey" it could be argued is what we already have with human creation there are only 7 basic plot archetypes. As I mentioned the tools will progress and also there are clear signatures between AI tools now. AI vs the same tool may seem samey but each has their own theme and can be clearly differentiated with a trained eye. This means that in the probably near future, the sameness will be gone completely.
3. Others have said that AI can't create anything new, it just copies what is old and reorients it in a new way. This has long been said of human imagination. There is nothing new under the sun, is the phrase from far back in the past. However this is an incorrect thought. People claim that AI cannot create, only copy. I do not want AI to create. I want it to copy the inputs I get it and provide an output based on those inputs. I am the creator, AI is my tool. My creations are also not 100% my own. Nothing is new under the sun. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. AI is a tool and the limitations some have put on it in their head are not actually the limitations of the tool but rather limitations of your own imagination in how it could be used.
4. Let me give you one example. Say that I use AI to create a Studio Ghibli meme. It is funny but a ripoff. Now let's say Studio Ghibli used AI in their next movie. Do you see how this changes the dynamic when the original artist is using the tool which simply emulates their previous art with a prompt? Studio Ghibli doesn't need it, granted, but say that I create an artstyle myself and then feed it to AI. Could it then not be my tool as well? I do need it and this would be the only way I could ever create something. In this case AI is copying my poor work to make higher quality work. It is still copying but because I am the user it is copying me and improving my work. That is how copying can be like invention. The tool is helping me invent as it helps millions everyday right now already.
 
AI cannot invent. It can only imitate. The spark of inspiration is not something that a data collation system can achieve. So-called "AI" - in its current implementation as a thoroughly-corporate content-generation tool - is not capable of innovation. It is simple, large-scale data-harvesting and reappropriation. That is the depth of its ability and utility.
Humans can't create something out of nothing. It's not possible to create information out of nowhere, it contradict physical laws.
Two main way to discover new ("invent something") is to compile two or more things that already present into something new and to enumerate possibilities over given boundary space (search something in an area).
AI can do both with no problem.

Look at anything that you think is creative and you'll see that it was derived from something else and if you follow chain long enough it'll stop at copying observed nature.
 
What's the point of this? Chess is not something you can brute force with language.

We have specialized AIs that already beat the best players, not only in chess.

Of course LLM would not fare well.
This. There are already many papers showing that LLMs and even many VLMs still struggle with symbolic and visual reasoning tasks. Other models and approaches are a better fit for problems like these.
 
It'll get there. This is the early days of AI really.

I don't get why people hate AI.

Okay, so I'm a dude, right? I am somewhat smart and I actually have some interesting ideas for games, books, movies, things that you would probably enjoy but I have no outlet right? I will never in my life have a way to draw anything. To paint anything. To make a game. I'll never have that because I don't have the skills, the tools, the licenses. So my creative ideas are locked away in my head and they will die there, slowly rotting into nothingness.

Then comes AI. AI allows people with ideas to see them come to life without needing a billion dollar studio, or even training on how to bring ideas to life. AI simply listens to my inputs and creates what I tell it, bringing my imagination to life where I can now share it with the world. It can do that for movies, games, paintings, books, even medicine eventually.

So before you hate AI because somebody might lose a job, imagine those ideas dying in our heads and how "stopping" AI will actually hinder us and our children from bringing our dreams to life. Right now only billion dollar studios can bring dreams to life. Wouldn't it be better if any one of us could make the next AAA banger with just ideas in our head? Wouldn't that be an absolute win for humanity even if we no longer needed the billion dollar studio?

This is so far removed from plausibility or sensibility that I actually just feel bad for you.
 
Humans can't create something out of nothing. It's not possible to create information out of nowhere, it contradict physical laws.
Two main way to discover new ("invent something") is to compile two or more things that already present into something new and to enumerate possibilities over given boundary space (search something in an area).
AI can do both with no problem.

Look at anything that you think is creative and you'll see that it was derived from something else and if you follow chain long enough it'll stop at copying observed nature.
You seem to have a complete and total misunderstanding as to what this interpretation of so-called "artificial intelligence" actually is, and what it consists of, not to mention its capabilities. Hell, you don't even seem to grasp the fundamental purpose of its design.

It is "artificial intelligence" in the broadest sense of the term, sure, but the token is used misleadingly. The models the talking suits and bloviating jackets can't shut up about are nothing more than data collation agents with the express purpose of streamlining workflow and taking "creation" out of the hands of "creators."

Even then, your starry-eyed notions of the capabilities of this mystical "artificial intelligence" (which lives entirely within the confines of your own head) are flawed. If only AI agents are "creating," you're living in a world of nonsensical fever dreams without context. No iteration of artificial intelligence - not even the most far-flung, theoretical models - is capable of the logical deduction and advanced abstraction required to mimic even one one-thousandth of the creative potential of a single human mind.

AI. Cannot. Invent. Especially not this hilarious corporate product masquerading as "intelligence."
 
No surprise. Same thing happens when you try iterating on a created image, after a couple attempts it can change a face even though you've asked it to keep the same look. Ask it to return to the original image and it won't remember how it looked.
 
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