ChatGPT Just Got ‘Absolutely Wrecked’ at Chess, Losing to a 1970s-Era Atari 2600

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has some major AI chatbot competitors in the market: Gemini, Copilot, Claude. Now add to that list the Atari 2600. The OG video game console, which was first released in 1977, was used in an engineer’s experiment to see how it would fare playing chess against the AI chatbot.

By using a software emulator to run Atari’s 1979 game Video Chess, Citrix engineer Robert Caruso said he was able to set up a match between ChatGPT and the 46-year-old game. The matchup did not go well for ChatGPT.

“ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were — first blaming the Atari icons as too abstract, then faring no better even after switching to standard chess notations,” Caruso wrote in a LinkedIn post.

“It made enough blunders to get laughed out of a 3rd-grade chess club,” Caruso said. “ChatGPT got absolutely wrecked at the beginner level.”

Caruso wrote that the 90-minute match continued badly and that the AI chatbot repeatedly requested that the match start over.

For decades, the ability for computers to defeat humans at chess has been a measure of their power. In 1997, IBM made headlines when its Deep Blue technology defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a series of matches.

Caruso’s experiment doesn’t mean ChatGPT is useless for chess, but because it’s more of a language model than a supercomputer, it’s less likely to serve that purpose well. A few years ago, a developer created a ChatGPT plugin called ChessGPT. But it may be better to discuss chess with OpenAI’s chatbot than to try to play against it.

A representative for OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

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