ChatGPT loses chess match to Atari 2600

ChatGPT, was trounced in a chess match by a 1979 video game running on an Atari 2600 emulator. Citrix engineer Robert Caruso set up the match using Video Chess to test how the AI would perform against vintage gaming software.

The result was unexpectedly lopsided. ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, forgot piece positions and made repeated beginner mistakes, eventually asking for the match to be restarted. Even when standard chess notation was used, its performance failed to improve.

Caruso described the 90-minute session as full of basic blunders, saying the AI would have been laughed out of a primary school chess club. His post highlighted the limitations of ChatGPT’s architecture, which is built for language understanding, not strategic board gameplay.

While the experiment doesn’t mean ChatGPT is entirely useless at chess, it suggests users are better off discussing the game with the bot than challenging it. OpenAI has not yet responded to the light-hearted but telling critique.

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