ChatGPT Played Chess Against a ‘70s Atari—and Got ‘Wrecked’

OpenAI’s ChatGPT got absolutely steamrolled by Atari Chess, a relic from 1979 running on a system that predates most of the people reading this. Citrix software engineer Robert Caruso pitted ChatGPT against ancient gaming hardware, and according to him, it wasn’t even close.

Caruso shared on LinkedIn that ChatGPT offered to take on Atari Chess after a chat about the history of AI in chess. It had all the confidence of a guy who’s only watched The Queen’s Gambit and thinks he’s ready for the world championship. What followed was an hour-and-a-half-long beatdown.

Despite being given a clear layout of the board and an explanation of the pieces, ChatGPT kept confusing bishops with rooks and couldn’t keep track of its moves. Wow, I’m just like ChatGPT.

It whined about the Atari’s pixelated graphics being “too abstract,” which makes ChatGPT sound like an entitled jerk. Caruso switched it all over to standard chess notation to even the playing field, only for ChatGPT to face-plant yet again.

ChatGPT ‘Wrecked’ in Chess Game Against a ‘70s Atari

The best part is that ChatGPT would make idiotic moves, get wrecked by an Atari, lose spectacularly, blame everything other than itself for the loss, and then claim that it’ll figure it out and eke out a victory “if we just started over.”

Readers, it never did. ChatGPT could not wrap its algorithms around the simple strategy of Atari Chess.

ChatGPT—trained on more text than every grandmaster biography combined—just could not wrap its neural nets around the simple, 8-bit strategy of Atari Chess. It feels especially wild to see our modern problem with overly confident dipshit leaders so perfectly encapsulated in an arrogant chatbot. Meanwhile, the primitive Atari quietly dominated without fanfare or complaint.

One downside to all this is that Caruso says there is no footage of any of this. We just have to take him on his word, which is a shame. I imagine the energy boost derived from watching ChatGPT get its ass handed to it by a machine that hails from the era of shag carpeting and disco balls could power Vegas for a month.