ChatGPT got 'absolutely wrecked' in chess by 1977 Atari, then claimed it was unfair

OpenAI's artificial intelligence model was defeated by a nearly 50-year-old video game program.

Citrix software engineer Robert Caruso posted about the showdown between the AI and the old tech on LinkedIn, where he explained that he pitted OpenAI's ChatGPT against a 1970s chess emulator, meaning a version of the game ported into a computer.

'ChatGPT got absolutely wrecked on the beginner level.'

The chess game was simply titled Video Chess and was released in 1979 on the Atari 2600, which launched in 1977.

According to Caruso, ChatGPT was given a board layout to identify the chess pieces but quickly became confused, mistook "rooks for bishops," and repeatedly lost track of where the chess pieces were.

ChatGPT even blamed the Atari icons for its loss, claiming they were "too abstract to recognize."

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Photo by Foto Olimpik/NurPhoto via Getty Images

The AI chatbot did not fare any better after the game was switched to standard chess notation, either, and still made enough "blunders" to get "laughed out of a 3rd grade chess club," Caruso wrote on LinkedIn.

Caruso revealed not only that the AI performed especially poorly, but that it had actually requested to play the game.

"ChatGPT got absolutely wrecked on the beginner level. This was after a conversation we had regarding the history of AI in Chess which led to it volunteering to play Atari Chess. It wanted to find out how quickly it could beat a game that only thinks 1-2 moves ahead on a 1.19 MHz CPU."

Atari's decades-old tech humbly performed its duty using just an 8-bit engine, Caruso explained.

The engineer described Atari's gameplay as "brute-force board evaluation" using 1977-era "stubbornness."

"For 90 minutes, I had to stop [Chat GPT] from making awful moves and correct its board awareness multiple times per turn."

The OpenAI bot continued to justify its poor play, allegedly "promising" it would improve "if we just started over."

Eventually, the AI "knew it was beat" and conceded to the Atari program.

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The Atari 2600 was a landmark video game console known predominantly for games like Pong, but also Pac-Man and Indy 500.

By 1980, Atari had sold a whopping 8 million units, according to Medium.

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