OpenAI’s AI Faces Off Against Vintage Video Game
An AI model from OpenAI recently faced off against a nearly 50-year-old video game, and it didn’t go well. Robert Caruso, a software engineer at Citrix, shared his experience on LinkedIn, revealing how he matched OpenAI’s ChatGPT against a chess emulator from the 1970s.
Caruso stated, “ChatGPT was absolutely destroyed at the beginner level.” The game in question, called Video Chess, was launched in 1979 for the Atari 2600, a console that debuted in 1977.
According to Caruso, he provided ChatGPT with a chessboard layout to help it identify chess pieces. However, the AI struggled and became confused, mistaking “Luke for the Bishop” and often losing track of the pieces on the board.
Interestingly, ChatGPT even placed some blame on the Atari’s graphics, claiming they were “too abstract and unrecognizable.”
Despite the struggles, when the game was switched to standard chess notation, ChatGPT still didn’t fare much better, managing only to generate some chuckles among third-year chess students, as Caruso noted.
He mentioned that the AI not only performed poorly but also needed assistance in actually participating in the game. Caruso added, “ChatGPT was absolutely destroyed at the beginner level. This led me to volunteer for a game of Atari Chess after I had been discussing the history of AI in chess. I was curious about how quickly I could win against a game running on a 1.19MHz CPU.”
The Atari’s old technology, operating on an 8-bit engine, still held its ground. The engineers described its gameplay as a “brute force board evaluation” that showcased the stubbornness of the technology from 1977.
Caruso recounted, “For 90 minutes, I had to intervene repeatedly as ChatGPT made poor moves and lost track of the board.” Eventually, the AI acknowledged its shortcomings when the Atari program recognized it had lost.
The Atari 2600 is celebrated as a groundbreaking video game console, primarily known for titles like Pong, but it also gained fame for games like Pac-Man and Indy 500. By 1980, Atari sold an impressive 8 million units.
