Calling out to some chess-playing-function would be a deviation from the pure LLM paradigm. As a medium-level chess player I have walked through some of the LLM victories (ChatGPT 3-5-turbo-instruction); I find it is not very good at winning by mate - it misses several chances of forced mate. But forced mate is what chess engines are good at - can be calculated by exhaustive search of valid moves in a given board position.
So I'm arguing that it doesn't call out - it should gotten better advice if it did.
But I remain amazed that OP does not report any illegal moves made any of by LLMs. Assuming training material includes introductory texts of chess playing and a lot of chess games in textual notation (e.g. PGN) I would expect at least occasional illegal moves since the rules are defined in terms of board positions. And board positions are a non-trivial function of the set of moves made in a game. Does an LLM silently perform a transformation of the set of moves to a board position? Can LLMs, during training, read and understand board-position diagrams of chess books?
> But I remain amazed that OP does not report any illegal moves made any of by LLMs.
They did (but not enough detail to know how much of an impact it had):
> For the open models I manually generated the set of legal moves and then used grammars to constrain the models, so they always generated legal moves. Since OpenAI is lame and doesn’t support full grammars, for the closed (OpenAI) models I tried generating up to 10 times and if it still couldn’t come up with a legal move, I just chose one randomly.
So I'm arguing that it doesn't call out - it should gotten better advice if it did.
But I remain amazed that OP does not report any illegal moves made any of by LLMs. Assuming training material includes introductory texts of chess playing and a lot of chess games in textual notation (e.g. PGN) I would expect at least occasional illegal moves since the rules are defined in terms of board positions. And board positions are a non-trivial function of the set of moves made in a game. Does an LLM silently perform a transformation of the set of moves to a board position? Can LLMs, during training, read and understand board-position diagrams of chess books?