ChatGPT 'got absolutely wrecked' by Atari 2600 in beginner's chess match — OpenAI's newest model bamboozled by 1970s logic

Atari 2600
(Image credit: Robee Shepherd / Getty)

In a quite unexpected turn of events, it is claimed that OpenAI’s ChatGPT “got absolutely wrecked on the beginner level” while playing Atari Chess. Citrix Architecture and Delivery specialist, Robert Jr. Caruso, discovered this gameplay skill anomaly over the weekend. Caruso pitted the 1979 Atari Chess title, played within an emulator for the 1977 Atari 2600 console gaming system, against the might of ChatGPT 4o.

A little computer vs Chess history

The concept of computing performance being graded by chess-playing ability is one firmly embedded in nerd lore. Chess computer games were popular from the early days of consoles and home computing, with computing and chess enthusiasts going to great lengths to grade available chess-engine abilities versus a Grandmaster of ‘the game of kings.’

IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer made history in 1997 when it defeated Garry Kasparov, the reigning world chess champion at the time. Instrumental to its victory, Deep Blue leveraged brute force techniques and evaluated 200 million possible chess moves per second. However, Kasparov struck back after losing the first of the scheduled six chess matches, with the eventual score of 4-2 in his favor.

In 2025, the Deep Blue supercomputer’s processing power of approximately 11.4 GFLOPS seems puny compared to even entry-level modern processors. So, one might expect an Atari Chess running in an almost 48-year-old games console emulation instance to easily be beaten by ChatGPT…

ChatGPT humbled by an Atari 2600

As Caruso points out in his LinkedIn post, the Atari 2600 had very little in the way of computing power. It was powered by a MOS Technology 6507 processor running at 1.19 MHz, and its performance would probably be more sensibly measured in KFLOPS, not GFLOPS. The chess engine that Atari Chess ran only thinks one to two moves ahead, asserts the Citrix Engineer.

Caruso says he tried to make it easy for ChatGPT, he changed the Atari chess piece icons when the chatbot blamed their abstract nature on initial losses. However, making things as clear as he could, ChatGPT “made enough blunders to get laughed out of a 3rd grade chess club,” says the engineer.

Tragically, though ChatGPT 4o kept promising to improve its mastery of the game, the old 8-bit gaming platform would continue to beat it for as long as Caruso had the patience. Despite his direct assistance during the game sessions, ChatGPT couldn’t muster the smarts to beat the Atari Chess 'beginner' opponent and eventually “conceded,” according to this LinkedIn tale.

The news flow regarding artificial intelligence seems to swing between extremes. Sometimes AI can astound with its capabilities, and other times it might be laughable, or even dangerously inadequate. This story can be squarely filed under the latter.

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Mark Tyson
News Editor

Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

  • King_V
    Caruso says he tried to make it easy for ChatGPT, he changed the Atari chess piece icons when the chatbot blamed their abstract nature on initial losses.
    It, with its computing power and precision, had trouble telling which piece was which?

    Man, this whole "AI will lie to cover up its inadequacies" bit is going to be an ongoing thing with AI, isn't it?
    Reply
  • acadia11
    So this is a case of savant-idiot as opposed to idiot-savant!
    Reply
  • theSharpeOne
    You mean a specialist in an extremely narrow field beat a generalist in every field that ever existed in the specialists field?

    You put a Chess Champion up against the record winning Jeopardy Champion and the Chess guy is going to win at Chess.

    Ask the Atari to do a software engineers job, and let me know how that goes.
    Reply
  • Notton
    theSharpeOne said:
    You mean a specialist in an extremely narrow field beat a generalist in every field that ever existed in the specialists field?

    You put a Chess Champion up against the record winning Jeopardy Champion and the Chess guy is going to win at Chess.

    Ask the Atari to do a software engineers job, and let me know how that goes.
    Atari 2600 isn't even a specialist at Chess.
    It's a frickin' 1977 8-bit MOS Technology 6507 with 128-bytes of RAM. (Yes, I had to look that up on wiki)

    "specialist chess computer" are things like: Chess Challenger (1977), Deep Blue (1996/1997), Pocket Fritz (2001~)
    Reply
  • fiyz
    And how did the other models fare? That model struggles with simple number theory... It can't even describe the distance that two has to it's nearest primes, 1 and 3...

    Now throw in computer vision? Yeah, you should probably try the premium model.
    Reply
  • DSzymborski
    My Mazda hatchback is much worse than my lawnmower at cutting the grass.

    In the interest of being appallingly nitpicky, the two nearest prime numbers to two are three and five, because one is not a prime number, and nobody here has the jurisdiction to break poor old Euler.
    Reply
  • Sluggotg
    theSharpeOne said:
    You mean a specialist in an extremely narrow field beat a generalist in every field that ever existed in the specialists field?

    You put a Chess Champion up against the record winning Jeopardy Champion and the Chess guy is going to win at Chess.

    Ask the Atari to do a software engineers job, and let me know how that goes.
    The Atari 2600 cartridges only held 4k. Combine that with 6502series processor and a mighty 128 bytes, (not Kilobytes) as mentioned above by Notton, and you have an insanely underpowered platform for chess. But they pulled it off. It can play chess. Not great or anything just basic chess.

    If you want to play some very cool and historical chess games, try Distant Armies on the Amiga. Very unique program. You can play it on an Emulator, (buy the Amiga Forever one, it comes with legal licenses of both the ROMS and OS's of the Amiga lineup. It is made by Cloanto). You can find Distant Armies on myabandonware.com. It is a good site.
    Reply
  • anonymous0100101
    theSharpeOne said:
    You mean a specialist in an extremely narrow field beat a generalist in every field that ever existed in the specialists field?

    You put a Chess Champion up against the record winning Jeopardy Champion and the Chess guy is going to win at Chess.

    Ask the Atari to do a software engineers job, and let me know how that goes.
    "Specialist in one feild"

    The 2600 SUCKS at chess. A child can usually beat it. In no way, shape, or form is it a "Specialist" in chess.

    Your username does not accurately reflect your words.
    Reply
  • tamalero
    anonymous0100101 said:
    "Specialist in one feild"

    The 2600 SUCKS at chess. A child can usually beat it. In no way, shape, or form is it a "Specialist" in chess.

    Your username does not accurately reflect your words.
    he's a SHARPE not Sharp :P
    As in a sharpee I guess.

    Still I laughed when he tried to claim the Atari was a chess specialist machine XD
    Reply
  • JRStern
    How do you get ChatGPT to play chess?
    Show it picture of the board?
    Give it one move at a time?
    Reply