ChatGPT hilariously loses to 1979 Atari Chess on beginner mode, exposing AI's limits in strategy games. A shocking and funny tech showdown!
In a surprising and somewhat humorous experiment, OpenAI's ChatGPT 4o model was decisively defeated by the Atari 2600's chess engine running on beginner difficulty. The test was conducted by Robert Jr. Caruso, a Citrix engineer, wanted to see how quickly ChatGPT could beat a chess computer that only thinks one or two moves ahead. He used an emulator to run the 1979 Atari Video Chess cartridge, expecting an easy win for the advanced AI model. However, the outcome was quite the opposite.
Despite ChatGPT's cutting-edge AI capabilities and massive training investment, it struggled significantly with the game. It confused chess pieces (e.g., rooks for bishops), missed simple tactics like pawn forks, and repeatedly lost track of the board state. Initially, ChatGPT blamed the Atari chess piece icons for being too abstract, but even after switching to standard chess notation and receiving direct assistance during the game, it continued to make fundamental errors that would embarrass a beginner player. Over about 90 minutes of gameplay, Caruso had to frequently correct ChatGPT's moves and board awareness. Eventually, ChatGPT conceded defeat, though it asked to "start over" for another attempt.
This result is particularly striking given the vast difference in computing power: the Atari 2600 runs on a MOS Technology 6507 processor at just 1.19 MHz with minimal memory, while ChatGPT operates on modern, powerful hardware. The Atari chess engine itself is very basic, only looking one or two moves ahead, yet it managed to outplay ChatGPT on the beginner level. This outcome highlights that ChatGPT, while excellent at language and pattern recognition, is not specialized for spatial reasoning or strategic gameplay like dedicated chess engines.
Historically, chess has been a benchmark for AI progress, with IBM's Deep Blue famously defeating world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 by evaluating millions of moves per second. Modern chess engines like Stockfish have ratings far beyond human grandmasters. However, ChatGPT is not a chess engine but a large language model designed for conversational tasks, which explains its poor performance in this context.
Bottom Line, the experiment revealed that despite its advanced AI status, ChatGPT is not equipped to play chess at even a beginner computer level without errors. This serves as a reminder of the limitations of general AI models in tasks outside their primary design and suggests that ChatGPT is better suited for language-based tasks rather than strategic games like chess.
About the Writer
Jenny, the tech wiz behind Jenny's Online Blog, loves diving deep into the latest technology trends, uncovering hidden gems in the gaming world, and analyzing the newest movies. When she's not glued to her screen, you might find her tinkering with gadgets or obsessing over the latest sci-fi release.What do you think of this blog? Write down at the COMMENT section below.
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