The Atari Video Computer System (later renamed the “2600”) was released in 1977. Connected to a television set, it gave home users access to all kinds of games through cartridges plugged into it. Other gaming consoles existed, but the VCS achieved huge success, especially when arcade games like “Space Invaders” were converted to run on it. Altogether, over 400 cartridges were produced for the Atari including “Video Chess” (1979) in which the VCS - with its tiny memory and very slow processor, by modern standards - was able to play chess against a human opponent.
Despite their age, VCS games are still played today, both on console hardware or via emulation. Recently, this led engineer Robert Jr. Caruso to pit Atari Video Chess against ChatGPT 4o. The idea for the contest actually came from ChatGPT during an interaction Caruso was having with the LLM concerning the use of AI in chess programmes. The suggestion ChatGPT made was to test out how quickly it could beat something as basic as a 36 year old chess program. However, things didn’t go as the AI predicted: “ChatGPT got absolutely wrecked on the beginner level.”
Now, there’s no surprise, in a sense, with this failure. An LLM isn’t a game-playing system but a token-generating one. It takes in a long list of existing tokens (its ‘context window’) and predicts what tokens should follow based on its training data, with a splash of randomness thrown in for variation. It doesn’t know the human context of what it’s talking about. It doesn’t understand the topic it’s discussing. All it ‘knows’ is what tokens are most likely to follow other tokens. So ChatGPT’s suggestion that it take on (down) the Atari wasn’t an awareness of its own abilities. It was just parroting what humans might have boasted about such an old game, but without the training data actually to let it win a game of Atari chess. It was ‘fooled’ into overconfidence.
That’s not a surprise. We can be far too confident about what we are and what we can do. And the Bible tells us that this is supremely true of our relationship to God, as seen in our response to His laws. The apostle Paul describes the Old Testament law as ‘holy’, adding that the commandment not to covet is ‘holy, righteous and good’ (Romans 7:12). The laws of the Bible are wonderful gifts given by God to us to express his will for the world and, thus, expose how we sinful human beings fall short of His standard. However, Paul knew from personal experience that it was also possible to abuse the law through proud human overconfidence.
In the days before he became a Christian, Paul thought the law was the means he could use to get eternal life: he believed that by keeping the law he would earn God’s blessing. And he was convinced he was utterly successful in doing this (Philippians 3:5). Then he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. Jesus, whom he had opposed and whose execution he approved. Jesus, whose disciples he had violently persecuted. Jesus, whom God had raised from the dead and taken to heaven! And Paul saw that his law-keeping life had actually made him God’s enemy. Instead of using the law as God intended, Paul had used it to flatter his own pride, to think himself better than he really was. He now saw that his law-keeping was actually a stinking pile of dung (Philippians 3:7-9). But that was a great thing, because he turned from himself to put his faith in Christ.
Don’t make ChatGPT’s mistake and believe you are more than you are, or you could find yourself ‘absolutely wrecked’ one day (Revelation 20:11-15). Learn from Paul.
Photo by Evan Amos on Wikimedia
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Introduction to this series of posts
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Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated in whole or in part into any other language.