Technology

If you feed it every chess game, it can tell you which spaces the knight is likely to move to, and which it very unlikely to move to, but it does not understand how the knight moves.

Well, it knows how the knight moves, but it might forget that's it's an important rule after it starts to lose context. That's also how LLMs start to lose track of what's actually on the board.

There are definitely differences between LLMs and Neural Networks, but at the end of the day, they are both just gigabytes of weights. And really, both types are similar to what the human brain possesses. People tend to forget that the human brain isn't just some monolithic thing. There's a lot of difference specialized pieces. If you ask Magnus Carlsen how he calculated the best move on the chess board in a blitz game, he literally cannot tell you! It just appears, because that part of the brain is trained and hardwired to calculate good moves, based on the current board state.

A LLM uses logic and reasoning to arrive at a solution. That's not really compatible with intense pre-trained calculation. You can't talk yourself into a chess move at the speed the game requires. You can quickly think about possibilities, but you have to already have pre-trained calculations to get at least 90-95% of the way there, to pick from a few different lines.

On the other hand, Neural Networks beat the shit out of the greatest grandmasters in chess. Hands down. On average, they are at least +500 ELO to the best GMs. And everybody in the chess world knows this, which is why everybody uses these tools outside of 1v1 human to human games. (Obviously, cheating is taken very seriously, and has made plenty of headlines over the years.) Every GM analyzes their own games using those engines, to pick apart mistakes.