ChatGPT crushed by 1980s Atari chess engine in “beginner” mode

Although generative artificial intelligence (AI) has gone a long way in these past few years, it seems that it still sucks at chess, as old-school Atari has just crushed one of generative AI’s representatives, ChatGPT, in a chess game – at a beginner level.

Indeed, a chess-playing console from 50 years ago has taken on ChatGPT and won in a unique experiment in which an engineer set the most recent ChatGPT 4o model against his Atari 2600’s chess engine on beginner difficulty, according to the engineer’s LinkedIn post from June 10.

The engineer in question is Citrix’s Robert Caruso, who was discussing the history of chess with ChatGPT, and the AI model wanted to find out “how quickly” it would defeat a chess computer that can only think one or two moves ahead, then requesting to play against Atari’s 1979 Video Chess cartridge.

As Caruso said in a comment below his post, ChatGPT was explaining the differences between chess engines like Stockfish and AlphaZero, claiming it was a strong player itself and would easily defeat Atari’s Video Chess, requesting that he set up the game using the Stella emulator.

Old-school Atari wipes the floor with ChatGPT

Naturally, Caruso obliged and pulled out an emulation of Video Chess. ChatGPT analyzed board positions based on images to decide its next moves but, instead of wiping the (proverbial and actual chess) board with Atari, it struggled. As the engineer recalled:

“ChatGPT got absolutely wrecked on the beginner level. (…) Despite being given a baseline board layout to identify pieces, ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks, and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were—first blaming the Atari icons as too abstract to recognize, then faring no better even after switching to standard chess notation.”

Meanwhile, ChatGPT continues to expand its use cases, as its creator OpenAI has earlier this year launched ChatGPT Gov, a specialized version of ChatGPT tailored for government agencies in the United States, that the technology behemoth referred to as the “most powerful version” of its platform.

Elsewhere, modern technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), can help chess grandmasters like Magnus Carlsen to remain among the best in the world, and last year he even launched his own chess app called Take Take Take, which provides daily tournament recap videos and analyzes players’ performance in major competitions.