ChatGPT Outplayed: 1970s Atari 2600 Triumphs in Chess Showdown

ChatGPT Defeated at Chess by 1970s-Era Atari 2600

OpenAI's ChatGPT has some major competitors in the market: Gemini, Copilot, Claude. Add to that list: the Atari 2600. The OG video game console, which was first released in 1977, was used in an engineer's experiment to see how it would fare playing chess against the AI chatbot. By using a software emulator to run Atari's 1979 game Video Chess, Citrix engineer Robert Caruso said he wwas able to set up a match between ChatGPT and the 46-year-old game. The matchup did not go well for ChatGPT. "ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were -- first blaming the Atari icons as too abstract, then faring no better even after switching to standard chess notations," Caruso wrote in a LinkedIn post. "It made enough blunders to get laughed out of a 3rd grade chess club," Caruso said. "ChatGPT got absolutely wrecked at the beginner level." Caruso wrote that the 90-minute match continued badly and that the AI chatbot repeatedly requested the match start over. For decades, the ability for computers to defeat humans at chess has been a measure of their power. In 1997, IBM made headlines when its Deep Blue technology defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a series of matches. Caruso's experiment doesn't mean ChatGPT is useless for chess, but because it's more a language model than a supercomputer, it's less likely to serve that purpose well. A few years ago, a developer created a ChatGPT plugin called ChessGPT. But it may be better to discuss chess with OpenAI's chatbot than to try to play against it. A representative for OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

ChatGPT Just Got 'Absolutely Wrecked' at Chess, Losing to a 1970s-Era Atari 2600

By using a software emulator to run Atari's 1979 game Video Chess, Citrix engineer Robert Caruso said he was able to set up a match between ChatGPT and the 46-year-old game. The matchup did not go well for ChatGPT. "ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were -- first blaming the Atari icons as too abstract, then faring no better even after switching to standard chess notations," Caruso wrote in a LinkedIn post. "It made enough blunders to get laughed out of a 3rd-grade chess club," Caruso said. "ChatGPT got absolutely wrecked at the beginner level." Caruso wrote that the 90-minute match continued badly and that the AI chatbot repeatedly requested that the match start over. For decades, the ability for computers to defeat humans at chess has been a measure of their power. In 1997, IBM made headlines when its Deep Blue technology defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a series of matches. Caruso's experiment doesn't mean ChatGPT is useless for chess, but because it's more of a language model than a supercomputer, it's less likely to serve that purpose well. A few years ago, a developer created a ChatGPT plugin called ChessGPT. But it may be better to discuss chess with OpenAI's chatbot than to try to play against it. A representative for OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

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

OpenAI's latest and greatest AI model was outclassed by the 1.19 MHz near 50-year-old console gaming legend. 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. 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... 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.

ChatGPT Gets 'Absolutely Wrecked' in Chess Match With 1978 Atari

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has been making ambitious predictions about a superintelligent artificial general intelligence (AGI) coming in the near future -- but its flagship chatbot just got trounced by a 46-year-old device at one of the world's oldest games of skill. Using an emulator, one software developer pitted ChatGPT against the Atari 2600's chess engine to test its metaphorical might at the 1978 game Video Chess. But ChatGPT was allegedly "absolutely wrecked" at just the beginner level of the game. According to a LinkedIn post on the experiment, ChatGPT reportedly "confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks, and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were." "It made enough blunders to get laughed out of a third-grade chess club," quipped the developer. The large language model (LLM) reportedly then blamed its defeat on the Atari game's pixelated chess piece icons being "too abstract to recognize." However, it fared no better after switching to standard chess notation. ChatGPT allegedly kept promising it would improve "if we just started over," only to surrender roughly 90 minutes in. To add insult to injury, ChatGPT was the one to originally suggest the match-up, in a conversation on the topic with the developer who set it up. To put the defeat in perspective, the Atari 2600 boasts just 0.3 MIPS of processing power, roughly 250,000 times less than a mere iPhone 15 Pro, never mind the hundred-million-dollar data centers powering OpenAI's ChatGPT. Though it's certainly an eye-popping result, it's probably a context-specific ChatGPT issue rather than an AI issue. Human chess masters effectively conceded defeat to their supercomputer rivals in the late '90s, when IBM's Deep Blue won a close victory over reigning chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. AI's victories in the world's games of skill have largely continued unabated for the past few decades, with Google's DeepMind cracking the ancient Chinese game of Go in 2016, followed by Blizzard's classic real-time strategy game StarCraft II in 2019. AI's dominance in games may even be moving into the physical world, with AI-infused machines starting to beat competent human players at real-world sports. Japan's Omron Corporation showcased its AI robot arm FORPHEUS in 2017, which could beat mid-level and amateur ping pong players, though it fell short of besting world-class players of the sport.

Chap claims Atari 2600 beat ChatGPT at chess

1.19MHz eight-bit CPU trounced modern GPUs - can you do better with your retro-tech? The Atari 2600 gaming console came into the world in 1977 with an eight-bit processor that ran at 1.19MhZ, and just 128 bytes of RAM - but that's apparently enough power to beat ChatGPT at chess. So says infrastructure architect Robert Caruso, who over the weekend posted the results of an experiment he conducted to "pit ChatGPT against the Atari 2600's chess engine (via Stella emulator) and see what happens." ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, and repeatedly lost track of pieces Caruso decided to run the experiment after conversing with ChatGPT about the history of chess. At some point in that chat, the bot volunteered to play against the Atari - a reasonable suggestion as "Video Chess" was one of the games Atari commissioned for its console. Online chat in which chess wonks discuss the merits of Video Chess suggest it may have played at a level beginners may have found challenging, and perhaps gave regular recreational players of intermediate skill a little to worry about. Caruso thought his experiment would be "a lighthearted stroll down retro memory lane." Instead, he watched as the Atari humiliate ChatGPT. "ChatGPT got absolutely wrecked on the beginner level," he wrote. "Despite being given a baseline board layout to identify pieces, ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks, and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were." Caruso said ChatGPT blamed the icons Atari chess uses "as too abstract to recognize". But even after changing to standard chess notation, the chatbot "made enough blunders to get laughed out of a 3rd grade chess club." "For 90 minutes, I had to stop it [ChatGPT] from making awful moves and correct its board awareness multiple times per turn," he wrote. The chatbot "kept promising it would improve 'if we just started over'." Eventually the bot conceded the game. "Have you played Atari today?" Caruso asked, invoking the company's advertising slogan. We challenge you to make them fight AI and let us know the results.

ChatGPT gets crushed at chess by a 1 MHz Atari 2600

Editor's take: Despite being hailed as the next step in the evolution of artificial intelligence, large language models are no smarter than a piece of rotten wood. Every now and then, some odd experiment or test reminds everyone that so-called "intelligent" AI doesn't actually exist if you're living outside a tech company's quarterly report. A cycle-exact emulation of the Atari 2600 CPU running at a meager 1.19 MHz is more than enough to utterly humiliate ChatGPT in a game of chess. Citrix engineer Robert Jr. Caruso conducted the "funny" little experiment over the weekend, pitting OpenAI's mighty chatbot against a virtual Atari 2600 console emulated by Stella. It didn't end well for the chatbot. Caruso reportedly got the idea from ChatGPT itself, after chatting with the bot about the history of AI and chess. OpenAI's service volunteered to play "Atari Chess," which Caruso assumed referred to Video Chess - the only chess title ever released for the Atari 2600. Despite being given a basic layout of the board to identify the pieces, ChatGPT struggled. The bot confused rooks for bishops, missed obvious pawn forks, and made a series of baffling blunders, according to Caruso. At one point, ChatGPT even blamed external factors like the abstract symbols used by Video Chess to depict the pieces for its inability to keep track of the game state. "For 90 minutes, I had to stop it from making awful moves and correct its board awareness multiple times per turn," the engineer said about ChatGPT's performance against an emulated CPU console from the 70s. The bot apparently kept asking to restart the game in hopes of improving its performance, but was ultimately defeated by an 8-bit chess engine. A 1 MHz CPU should, at best, be able to think one or two moves ahead, while ChatGPT relies on an endless army of modern, power-hungry GPUs to keep its chat service running. And yet, the 1 MHz CPU won, thrashing the chatbot at beginner level. Caruso's experiment is a useful reminder about what LLM models actually are: a complex, heuristics-based black box search engine designed to constantly please the final user with some sort of captivating result. They don't "know" anything, have no reasoning or deduction capabilities, and certainly they have no intelligence on their own. And they absolutely suck at chess. I never owned an Atari 2600 back in the day, though I did spend some glorious afternoons with my mighty Intellivision console. Next time, I'll try to humble ChatGPT by making it play a round of Battle Chess on an emulated replica of my first x86 machine: an 80286 running at a blazing 16 MHz.

ChatGPT takes on a 1977 Atari at chess ... and it didn't go well

The match between ChatGPT and Atari was illuminatingAI generated image using Grok ChatGPT volunteered to play a 1977-vintage Atari 2600 to a game of chess and came to regret it after the eight-bit chess engine from the age of Disco Fever and the introduction of the Force did better than expected. A lot better. On a LinkedIn post, Citrix software engineer Robert Caruso related how he entered into a conversation with ChatGPT about the history of AI in chess that led to it offering a game with Atari Chess. Using a Stella emulator, Caruso obliged, but the challenger didn't do as well as one would have thought for a representative of the Robotic Brainiacs that are supposedly on the threshold of surpassing human intelligence as they sprint down the homestretch to godhood. In fact, the Atari wiped the floor with ChatGPT when it came to chess. I don't mean the near-half-century-old game console won. I mean that ChatGPT made blunders that would embarrass the greenest of beginners. According to Caruso, the AI had trouble keeping even the most basic aspects of the game straight. It confused rooks for bishops, overlooked pawn forks, and forgot where pieces were. Even when the gameplay swapped to standard chess notation, it still played like a fish as it made lemon after lemon, as chess enthusiasts would say. As to the Atari, it just kept plugging away while Caruso spent 90 minutes stopping the AI from making multiple blunders until it finally conceded the match. What is particularly impressive about its victory is that the Atari chess engine dates from a time when just getting a computer (any computer) to play an actual legal game was a major accomplishment, much less a game console. Around 1977, I was writing chess programs and over the years bought a number of early computer chess games that I would soon give away because many couldn't handle castling or en passant - not to mention the ones where I discovered how to play a perfect game against it so I never lost. So why did a chess engine that came under the pathetic category and only looks one move ahead not just defeat but humiliate ChatGPT? The answer is one that tells us a lot about AI and how that blanket term is becoming obsolete as we come to understand more about the technology. It isn't that AI can't play chess or play chess well. We've had AI chess engines that can beat world champions for decades and are routinely used today to help grandmasters hone their skills. It's that AI isn't just one thing and isn't progressing like a monolith. More to the point, the term AI may not have any real meaning. We like to think of AI as something that exploded on the scene only in the last few years. In fact, it's been around since the 1960s and was understood theoretically back in the 1940s. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen reports of AI showing its nascent supremacy over humans by making scientific "discoveries," creating new recipes, outdoing doctors at diagnoses, or doing something clever only to recall precisely the same achievements being celebrated as far back as 1961. In other words, AI has been with us for a very long time and is really a blanket and rather loaded term for a vast array of computer technologies, from simple expert systems and rule-based algorithms to machine learning, neural networks, and advanced robotic systems that often have little to do with one another. One example is chess engines as compared to Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT. A chess engine is a very specialized algorithm that, at the highest level, runs on a specially designed computer capable of processing hundreds of millions of moves per second according to the strict rules of chess. These are designed to look several moves ahead in a game and trim the impossible-to-evaluate number of possible moves down to a manageable number while taking into account things like known chess openings combined with rules of thumb and the ability to learn from past mistakes. The result is a brute force chess player that doesn't play well - chess computers are inelegant things that are often compared to Martians in their thinking - but they make fewer blunders than their human opponents. However, they do play and the best are able to take down the best human players in the world. LLMs are completely different things made for very different purposes and, compared to many other AI applications, not very bright at all. They only seem ultra impressive to us because they are designed to handle language, can draw on extremely large databases, and play into the human tendency to anthropomorphize machines and do half the work of making them seem truly intelligent. The problem with LLMs and chess is that an LLM works by using its training from vast databases and linear algebra to predict the next token in its response, not as the application of complex game rules. They are also extremely bad at logic that would allow them to validate their moves against the rules of the game. They are also essentially stateless. They can keep the context of a conversation in their heads (if they had heads), but not multiple chess moves. As a result, they forget what they are doing, cannot keep the board straight, misinterpret positions, hallucinate pieces out of nowhere, and basically play in what can best be described as an absent-minded fashion. Bear in mind that it is not that LLMs aren't good enough yet to play chess and someday will be. It's the way they're built, just as a top-level chess engine like Stockfish would be helpless if you asked it to explain the game of chess or its history or discuss the rationale behind a move. We can see this by how chess engines and LLMs approach the board. The chess engine always has a precise understanding of the gameplay while the LLM works out problems statistically based on training data - the exact opposite to the engine. This also keeps the LLM from planning ahead. It can't handle deep search chess algorithms or minmax strategies, so they just regurgitate what they've learned from game transcripts and commentaries, not an actual assessment of the game. It also can't handle the symbolic representation of the board, resulting in the spontaneous invention of pieces, impossible board set ups, illegal moves, and verbose explanations to justify these. To put it another way, chess simply is not ChatGPT's game. But this goes beyond chess. This limitation highlights how LLMs like ChatGPT, while becoming increasingly useful and powerful, are not universal problem solvers. They can't handle precise logical thinking, strict rules, or tasks that require a persistent memory of contexts and reliance on hard facts. An LLM might be great at helping a chess engine explain the game or discuss strategies with a human being, but its metaphorical hand needs slapping if it reaches for a pawn. As International Grandmaster David Bronstein said, "The essence of chess is thinking about what chess is."

ChatGPT gets 'wrecked' by a simple 1977 Atari chess program

The popular AI chatbot repeatedly made embarrassing mistakes, misread moves, and lost track of its own pieces. Despite ever-growing interest in AI tools and assistants, it's worth remembering that they're still quite limited with numerous shortcomings. They are not as smart as they might seem on the surface. Case in point, ChatGPT is pretty useless when it comes to playing chess. As reported by Futurism, ChatGPT lost a chess game against the classic Atari 2600 gaming console. Robert Caruso, an engineer at Citrix, organised the game between the AI and a simple 1977 chess program released for the Atari 2600. During the game, ChatGPT made a series of embarrassing mistakes, misread moves, and kept losing track of its own pieces. "ChatGPT got absolutely wrecked on the beginner level," Caruso wrote. In the end, the AI chatbot simply gave up and lost. The fiasco is an important reminder that LLMs -- even the "reasoning" ones -- are still just language prediction models at their core. It's clear evidence that dedicated tools that are trained or coded for a specific purpose, like the Atari 2600's chess program, are still better than AI assistants that are supposed to do "everything." This should be an important lesson for tech companies like OpenAI and users who rely on AI tools.

ChatGPT "Absolutely Wrecked" at Chess by Atari 2600 Console From 1977

Image by Neil Godwin / GamesMaster Magazine via Getty / Futurism Despite all its advances, ChatGPT is seemingly still less smart -- at certain tasks, at least -- than an Atari game console from almost 50 years ago. In a post on LinkedIn, Citrix software engineer Robert Caruso explained how the OpenAI chatbot "got absolutely wrecked" by an Atari 2600 running Atari Chess, a game for the system released in 1979, when Jimmy Carter was still president. Launched in 1977, the Atari 2600 -- also marketed at the time as the Atari Video Computer System -- popularized at-home gaming after Atari released its "Pong" console two years prior. Still, that system was released some 21 years after the MANIAC I supercomputer became the first machine in history to defeat a human at modified chess, so you'd think that after another few decades, our cutting-edge tech would destroy the primordial Atari. Apparently, that wasn't the case. "ChatGPT got absolutely wrecked on the beginner level," Caruso wrote. "This was after a conversation we had regarding the history of AI in Chess which led to it volunteering to play Atari Chess. It wanted to find out how quickly it could beat a game that only thinks 1-2 moves ahead." Although the chatbot had been given a "baseline board" to learn the game and identify pieces, it kept mixing up rooks and bishops, misread moves, and "repeatedly lost track" of where its pieces were. To make matters worse, as Caruso explained, ChatGPT also blamed Atari's icons for being "too abstract to recognize" -- but when he switched the game over to standard notation, it didn't perform any better. For an hour-and-a-half, ChatGPT "made enough blunders to get laughed out of a 3rd grade chess club" while insisting over and over again that it would win "if we just started over," Caruso noted. (And yes, it's kind of creepy that the chatbot apparently referred to itself and the human it was interfacing with as "we.") "Meanwhile, Atari's humble 8-bit engine just did its thing," the engineer noted. "No language model. No flash. Just brute-force board evaluation and 1977 stubbornness." Unfortunately, we don't have any video of Caruso's gameplay setup to watch ChatGPT get destroyed by a nearly 50-year-old AI -- but at least we get to laugh at the idea of the chatbot's lack of gaming prowess.

ChatGPT may be the smartest software ever, but this Pong-era game console can do something it can't

The Atari 2600 wins this round, but OpenAI's Sam Altman believes the game has just begun Technology. The ever-advancing pinnacle of the processor. It's a modern-day blessing to most, but dreaded by those convinced it's five minutes away from flipping society onto its head like an egg served sunny-side down. The word alone can strike fear into the hearts of man. Especially if you shout it loud enough into their ears as you pass them on the street. And, if you were to take a small break from harassing the general public and ask one of them to name today's most advanced piece of technology, they'd likely say ChatGPT -- OpenAI's super-brainy chatbot, packed with enough artificial intelligence to seemingly make regular intelligence look like its eating glue from a pot in a sandbox. But if ChatGPT, the poster child for cutting-edge technology, is so smart, how did it just get absolutely bodied by a video game console released in 1977? When we think of competitors to ChatGPT, there's a usual list of suspects to choose from: Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity AI, and maybe even newcomer DeepSeek. What you wouldn't expect to appear in that list is the Atari 2600, a 48-year-old home video game console best known for bringing Pac-Man into the living rooms of millions of first-generation gamers. However, thanks to Citrix Engineer Robert Jr. Caruso, Atari's retro console can now be counted among ChatGPT's truest rivals, after it was used to repeatedly best OpenAI's GPT-4o model at a simple game of chess. In a now-viral post shared to LinkedIn, Caruso details his 90-minute experiment in pitting the computing might of tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs against the singular 1.19 MHz 8-bit MOS Technology 6507 processor of the Atari 2600, claiming ChatGPT "made enough blunders to get laughed out of a 3rd grade chess club." Clearly, they don't make them like they used to. The prevalence of the 2600 over ChatGPT is a true David vs. Goliath battle on a checkerboard stage, and a surprising outcome to most. However, there's a chasm of difference between chatbot and a chess engine, meaning the Atari 2600, which ran not as hardware but through the Stella emulator, likely had ChatGPT's number from the start. While OpenAI has made great strides in improving its model's memory capabilities, it's still primarily a language prediction machine, and not the next Deep Blue. Still, given the 2600's ability to only predict two moves in advance, it does highlight ChatGPT's shortcomings, and provide a thumb to the virtual eye for OpenAI's world's most intelligent chatbot. At least it would do if OpenAI had ever claimed as much. In fact, it's more often than not proclaiming the opposite. Stretching back to 2023, in an episode of the Lex Friedman podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was quick to label 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 lot." In fact, only recently has Altman pushed the message that AI is living up to its supposed smarts. In a blog post published on Tuesday, 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 yes, Atari's classic console may have bested ChatGPT this time, but if Altman's words are anything to go by, it could be a very short-lived victory.

Ancient video game from 1979 beats ChatGPT in a chess game

As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. TweakTown may also earn commissions from other affiliate partners at no extra cost to you. Being able to "beat the computer" in chess has been something PC, gaming, and tech enthusiasts have discussed for decades. In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer made headlines worldwide for defeating Garry Kasparov in a chess game. Compared to the PC hardware we have in 2025, Deep Blue is now what you'd consider retro regarding its capabilities, even though it could brute force its way to evaluate 200 million chess moves per second. Compared to Deep Blue, the Atari 2600 video game console is effectively from the Stone Age. It debuted in 1977, predating most modern gamers. With the rise of AI and chatbots like ChatGPT, you might think that it would have no problem beating Deep Blue in a round of chess, let alone going up against an Atari 2600 to play a game using the Atari Chess 'beginner' opponent difficulty setting. You'd be wrong, as Citrix Architecture and Delivery specialist Robert Jr. Caruso decided to carry out this little experiment and posted his findings on LinkedIn. Atari Chess, from 1979, runs on console hardware with a 1.19 MHz CPU. Due to its archaic hardware, Caruso notes that the game only thinks one or two moves ahead. According to his post, ChatGPT initially blamed its defeat on not being able to recognize chess pieces like Bishops and Pawns due to the Atari 2600's lo-fi visuals. And hey, based on how ancient Atari 2600 graphics look in 2025, we don't blame ChatGPT. However, when Carus switched to standard chess notation for the match-up, ChatGPT fared no better. It apparently "made enough blunders to get laughed out of a 3rd grade chess club." Caruso even tried helping the AI chatbot by stopping it from making "awful moves" to no avail. Yes, the hardware inside the Atari 2600 is powerful enough to beat ChatGPT in a game of chess. "Atari's humble 8-bit engine just did its thing," Caruso writes. "No language model. No flash. Just brute-force board evaluation and 1977 stubbornness."

ChatGPT took on a 50-year-old Atari -- and lost

In a surprising turn of events, ChatGPT, a leading AI chatbot, was defeated by the vintage Atari 2600 in a chess match. Despite ChatGPT's initial confidence and claims of chess prowess, the Atari console, launched in 1977, consistently outperformed the AI. The experiment highlighted the limitations of ChatGPT in logical reasoning and board awareness, leading to its eventual concession.ChatGPT, arguably the world's most popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, was humbled by a 50-year-old chess console. The Atari 2600, first launched in 1977, outperformed ChatGPT in a recent experiment to the point that the AI chatbot conceded. The experiment was set up by cloud computing engineer Robert Jr. Caruso after ChatGPT itself insisted on playing chess against an Atari following a conversation about AI in chess. OpenAI's chatbot "claimed it was a strong player in its own right and would easily beat Atari's Video Chess", Caruso said in a LinkedIn post. He expected it to be "a lighthearted stroll down retro memory lane" for the AI. His hopes were deflated once the match began. ChatGPT and its various AI models are being used for everything from answering emails, generating images and conducting in-depth research. Meanwhile, Atari 2600 sports an 8-bit, 1.1 MHz CPU which could only think 1-2 moves ahead. ChatGPT got absolutely wrecked on the beginner level, Caruso wrote. Despite being given a baseline board layout to identify pieces, ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks, and repeatedly lost track of pieces. The AI chatbot first blamed the Atari icons as too abstract to recognise, then failed to improve even after switching to the standard system of recording chess moves. At times, ChatGPT worked -- analysing moves, explaining options and offering solid advice. At others, it made absurd suggestions -- like sacrificing a knight to a pawn -- or tried to move pieces that had already been captured, even during turns when it otherwise had an accurate view of the board, Caruso wrote. He said he had to stop ChatGPT from making awful moves and correct its board awareness multiple times per turn over 90 minutes. The modern tech kept promising it would improve "if we just started over." Eventually, it conceded the challenge to Atari. Technology has been better at chess than humans since the IBM Deep Blue supercomputer defeated the erstwhile champion and renowned grandmaster Gary Kasparov in 1997. The latest Stockfish chess engine have an estimated 3,600 points on the Elo chess ranking system, whereas the current world number one Magnus Carlsen has the highest rating among humans at around 2,800. One response to Caruso's post argued that ChatGPT does not employ artificial general intelligence (AGI), and only emulates human examples. Thus, it was unfair to test it in a game of logic like chess. Another pointed out that ChatGPT is not a chess engine, unlike Atari 2600, which despite being archaic, tracks the board and formulates moves.

ChatGPT Kept 'Begging To Restart' Before Being Beaten By 1979 Atari 2600 In A 'Beginner Level' Chess Showdown - Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG), Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN)

An Atari 2600 chess cartridge has humiliated OpenAI's vaunted ChatGPT, highlighting the limits that large language models still face outside pure text. What Happened: Citrix engineer Robert Caruso pitted ChatGPT-4o against Video Chess (1979) through an emulator and watched the bot "get absolutely wrecked on the beginner level," he wrote on LinkedIn. Caruso said the 90-minute match went downhill immediately: the bot "confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were," first blaming Atari's pixel icons and then floundering even after he switched to algebraic notation. The system begged to restart several times before the 1.19 MHz console sealed the win. Chess has long served as a yardstick for machine intelligence. IBM's IBM Deep Blue dethroned the world champion, then Garry Kasparov, in 1997, but ChatGPT is a language generator and not a search-heavy chess engine, and therefore unlikely to serve that purpose well. See also: Apple Study Asks Whether AI Can Think For Itself: Experts Say Its Limits Are Human-Made Developers have tried to bridge the gap with plugins such as ChessGPT, yet the model still stumbles at board-state memory and legal-move tracking, as Caruso states. Why It Matters: The flop arrives as ChatGPT jostles with Alphabet Inc. GOOGL GOOG Google's Gemini, Microsoft's MSFT Copilot and Anthropic's Claude for everyday users. Alphabet recently expanded new Gemini AI additions to its search engine. OpenAI, for its part, rolled out a more "reliable" GPT-o3 Pro model earlier this week, hoping to keep developers loyal. OpenAI on Monday said its annualized revenue run rate has climbed to $10 billion, nearly doubling the $5.5 billion it posted at the end of 2024. The figure, which excludes Microsoft licensing fees and other one-off deals, reflects recurrent sales driven by ChatGPT's growing base of 500 million weekly active users as of March. The company is reportedly seeking up to $40 billion in a SoftBank-led funding round that could push its valuation to $300 billion. Rival Anthropic, backed by Amazon AMZN and Alphabet, has crossed a $3 billion run-rate after securing $3.5 billion in capital, giving it a $61.5 billion valuation. Image via Shutterstock Read next: Craig Federighi Says 'Building A Chatbot' Was Never The Goal, Promises Apple Intelligence's Focus Is To 'Meet You Where You Are' AMZNAmazon.com Inc$212.76-0.21%Stock Score Locked: Want to See it? Benzinga Rankings give you vital metrics on any stock - anytime. Reveal Full ScoreEdge RankingsMomentum63.07Growth97.15Quality68.76Value49.11Price TrendShortMediumLongOverviewGOOGAlphabet Inc$177.91-0.49%GOOGLAlphabet Inc$176.46-0.50%IBMInternational Business Machines Corp$281.640.04%MSFTMicrosoft Corp$473.120.11%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs