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A vintage Pong-era console exhibits capabilities beyond ChatGPT's reach.

Ancient 1977 Video Game System Triumphs Over ChatGPT in "The Game of Kings," Yet Victory Might Be Ephemeral

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4 min read
Classic 1977 video game console triumphs over ChatGPT in "The Game of Kings," yet its supremacy...
Classic 1977 video game console triumphs over ChatGPT in "The Game of Kings," yet its supremacy could be temporary.

A vintage Pong-era console exhibits capabilities beyond ChatGPT's reach.

Technology, the ever-advancing, awe-inspiring marvel. It's a modern blessing to most, but terror for those convinced it's about to flip society into a chaotic whirlwind any second.

You can't walk down the street without it sparking fear in people's hearts. Just yell it loud enough and watch their eyes widen in dread.

If you happened to step away from harassing the general public for a moment, and asked one of them to name the current peak of technology, they'd probably say ChatGPT, OpenAI's super-smart AI companion, loaded with enough artificial intelligence to make ordinary intellect seem like it's gnawing glue from a pot in a sandbox.

But, if ChatGPT, the darling of cutting-edge technology, is so smart, how did it just get utterly humiliated by a video game console from 1977?

ChatGPT vs. Atari 2600: Long live the elder?

When we think of ChatGPT's rivals, there's an obvious group of characters to choose from: Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity AI, and maybe a newcomer like DeepSeek.

What you wouldn't bet on seeing on that list is the Atari 2600, a 48-year-old home video game console, best known for bringing Pac-Man into millions of first-generation gamers' living rooms. But thanks to Citrix Engineer Robert Jr. Caruso, the Atari 2600 can now stand shoulder-to-shoulder with ChatGPT, having defeated OpenAI's GPT-4o model consistently at the humble game of chess.

The Laughing Stock, the Smart Alec

Obviously, there's a vast difference between a chatbot and a chess engine, so the Atari 2600, which ran through the Stella emulator, may have had an early advantage over ChatGPT. While OpenAI's been making great strides in boosting its model's memory capabilities, it's still essentially a language prediction machine, not the next Deep Blue.

Still, given the 2600's ability to only predict two moves ahead, it does put ChatGPT's shortcomings on display, and offers a sort of middle finger to OpenAI's "world's most intelligent chatbot."

At least it would be, if OpenAI had ever claimed ChatGPT was intelligent. In fact, it's more often touting the exact opposite.

Dating back to 2023, in an episode of the Lex Friedman podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman labeled GPT-4 as "a very early AI. It's slow, it is buggy, and it does not do a lot of things very well." Then, in 2024, during a Q&A at Stanford University, Altman claimed that ChatGPT was running on "the dumbest model any of you will ever have to use again by a long shot."

In fact, Altman only recently has begun to talk about AI actually living up to its supposed intellect. In a blog post titled The Gentle Singularity, Altman predicts: "We do not know how far beyond human-level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out."

So yeah, the Atari 2600 may have won this round, but if Altman's words are any indication, it might be a short-lived victory.

Additional Findings

  • Key elements of the Atari 2600's success:
  • The Atari 2600's chess engine only thinks one to two moves ahead, a simplistic but efficient strategy for a beginner-level game.
  • The Atari chess engine was designed to play chess within the constraints of the 8-bit hardware, primarily focusing on brute-force board evaluation.
  • ChatGPT's limitations:
  • ChatGPT is primarily a language model and not a specialized chess engine, making it poorly equipped for strategic games like chess.
  • ChatGPT struggled with recognizing chess pieces due to the Atari 2600's lo-fi visuals, even after switching to standard chess notation.
  • The experiment setup:
  • The experiment used a software emulator to run Atari's Video Chess against ChatGPT.
  • Efforts were made to assist ChatGPT by clarifying piece identities and preventing poorly thought-out moves, but it continued to struggle.
  1. The Atari 2600, a 48-year-old home video game console, has unexpectedly outperformed ChatGPT, OpenAI's super-smart AI companion, in a game of chess, challenging the notion of AI superiority.
  2. While ChatGPT is primarily a language model, the Atari 2600's chess engine, designed within the constraints of the 8-bit hardware, employs a simple yet efficient strategy, focusing on brute-force board evaluation.
  3. Despite efforts to assist ChatGPT by clarifying piece identities and preventing poorly thought-out moves, it struggled to recognize the lo-fi visuals of the Atari 2600's chess board and pieces.
  4. OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, has acknowledged ChatGPT's limitations, labeling it as "a very early AI" and criticizing its speed, bugs, and lack of efficiency in 2023.
  5. In the future, altman predicts groundbreaking advancements in AI, saying, "We do not know how far beyond human-level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out."
  6. As technology advances, the laptop, computer, smart-home devices, gadgets, and even ordinary household items are becoming smarter, enhancing our daily lives.
  7. In the realm of laptops, Mac and Windows continue to dominate the market, with their powerful RAM, GPU, processor, and storage, providing top-notch performance for graphic-intensive tasks, and the sleek display, offering an immersive viewing experience.
  8. Speaking of storage, solid-state drives, or SSDs, have revolutionized the computer industry by providing faster load times and a more robust, reliable storage solution compared to traditional hard drives, significantly improving technology's efficiency and speed.

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