CHESS - An LLM step too far?

I hang a lot with my pal Copilot nowadays. We chat. We exchange recipes. It acts like my therapist. Just normal stuff. So of course I asked my old buddy whether we could play a game of chess. Copilot exclaimed “I'd love to play a game of chess with you! We can play right here, turn by turn.”

It didn’t occur to me to ask if it actually knew how to play. At least not now.

After a few attempts he managed to get a board up with the notation and the pieces (the notation is wrong, as the numbers should start at 1 from the white side, but let’s ignore that for now).

I’m not a good chess player, so I pretty much do standard moves at the start. I began with moving my pawn in front of the queen two steps forward. My plan was actually to move the pawn in front of the king, but I got it wrong, so queen pawn it was. Copilot responded with mirroring my move. So far so good.

At this point, copilot exclaimed: “Both sides have claimed the center with their pawns—this is shaping up to be a classic opening!” Little did I know that it was only a classic opening because we were both quite terrible at chess!

I figured I’d just protect the first pawn, since I have no idea what to do next. So I moved the pawn in front of the king one step forward which copilot thought was “very solid” and then it went on to take two actions.

1. Developing its knight in preparation to control the centre, which is chess speak for moving his knight.

2. Change the board layout. Why, I have no idea.

This was such a shit move, I decided to call copilot out on it. I kindly stated: “The numbers on the side is in the wrong order and you changed the pieces to letters. Can you fix those things please.”

It responded with the following:

Numbers were still not right, but at least I got my pieces back. Another thing that came back was an additional black pawn! Copilot now had 9 pawns! And black’s original move had changed too.

I was reeling from the format change of the board at this point, so I continued the game in good faith. I moved my bishop and copilot responded with moving another pawn. And again decided to change the format of the board:

I don’t know if copilot knows my eyesight isn’t perfect, but that is one tiny board! I could still spy the fact that my queen and one of my bishops mysteriously had disappeared.

I asked that it make the board bigger again so I could get a full view of this never-do-gooder cheater.

There it was! White pieces mysteriously gone. Illegal moves blatantly on display! I was pleased to see that black’s knight was also gone. Maybe I could still turn this to my advantage I only could work out the rules that copilot was using.

I realised my bishop was threatened so moved it back to d3. Copilot called this a “solid retreat that keeps your bishop active and central” and then asked me what move I’d like to make now.

From my limited understanding of chess, there are no free moves. Copilot hadn’t made a move, but still asked me to make one. So I gently nudged it along with a kind: “isn't it your move?”

This move is magic! And with that I mean it is actual magic and against all chess rules I know. He now has two bishops that move on white tiles! I called this out with a question: “Do you really know how to play chess? It looks like you are getting confused or you are cheating.”

 Copilots response?

Copilot still lives under the misapprehension that it can play chess. It also thinks that misplacing pieces, not tracking the game state or making mistakes in execution isn’t cheating. Next time I fudge my taxes I will claim I “made a mistake in execution and didn’t track the whole tax return from start to finish” and see what the ATO thinks of that!

And what is this “juggling visuals and logic manually?” Manually? What on earth does that even mean?

This is stressing me out. I think I need to lie down a bit. I asked copilot to help me out with the stress I was feeling from all its incessant cheating. It responded:

I need a new friend.