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points by senordevnyc 1 day ago | 0 comments

How much do you want to bet that an LLM with the ability to search the web and write python scripts would smoke the best humans at chess and MTG?

How comforting is it really when it’s not the bare LLM beating you, but the LLM using tools it created?

[–] root_axis 23 hours ago

> an LLM with the ability to search the web and write python scripts would smoke the best humans at chess and MTG?

Even if that were true, humans don't need to search the web and write python scripts to play a competitive game of MTG.

[–] pixl97 13 hours ago

I have doubts about your statement.

The particular problem here is it's not addressing the intelligence spikiness between individual humans. Most humans aren't going to play a competitive game of MTG, a small percentage will rise above the rest and dominate.

Also this is being intelligence blind. Most humans could never write a good python script to play a competitive game of MTG, almost any SOTA model can.

This would be like a bee saying humans aren't intelligent because we can't see in ultra violet, where as we're damn good at making tools that can.

[–] senordevnyc 11 hours ago

Again, who cares? How does that help humans compete against LLMs in any domain where the LLM will have web search, python, and other tools (which is basically always)?

I don't understand this argument, it’s not like humans and LLMs are engaging in some kind of competition with strict rules where ONLY the raw LLM responses “count” or something.

[–] chr15m 1 day ago

> and MTG

No. The current frontier models would not beat the best humans at MTG, even with Python scripts and web search. Unlike Chess, there are no existing engines that beat humans.

[–] senordevnyc 11 hours ago

I’m skeptical, but I don’t know enough about MTG.

[–] chr15m 7 hours ago

You can simply look this up to verify it.

[–] senordevnyc 7 hours ago

I’m skeptical of the first part, not the second.

[–] drdexebtjl 1 day ago

I too could smoke the best humans at chess if I was allowed to search the web and write python scripts.

That makes me a good engineer, but not good at chess, and definitely not super intelligent.

[–] pixl97 13 hours ago

Without tools you are nothing, most of the animal kingdom could kill you pretty easily. Engineering is a massive part of human intelligence.

[–] senordevnyc 11 hours ago

Maybe that’s true (though I highly doubt it, tbh), but it would also take you orders of magnitude longer than an LLM.