Forget supercomputers and quantum Silicon Valley powers! In the wildest chess showdown of the year, the champion wasn’t a powerful AI, but the old-school Atari 2600 console with its ancient Video Chess software. Yes, you read that right! After ChatGPT lost a chess game last month, now Microsoft’s Copilot has been humiliated by a console from the 1970s.
This retro machine proved you don’t mess with classics. While large language models (LLMs) dominate the text world, when it comes to games requiring spatial orientation and strategy, they fall flat. ChatGPT and Copilot entered the game cockily and ended up as total beginners.
Engineer Robert Caruso led the experiments, carefully recording every move. By the seventh move, Copilot was already in a catastrophic state — it had lost two pawns, a knight, a bishop, and its queen ended up trapped after it ordered her to move right in front of Atari’s pieces.
Copilot claimed it could think 35 moves ahead but made the dumbest mistakes, lost track of the board, and even asked for a reset. In the end, it digitally and gracefully conceded, admitting Atari deserved the win.
This experiment isn’t just fun; it reveals a serious problem — LLMs still don’t understand context and can’t maintain attention in complex game structures. Until that changes, Atari remains the undefeated chess champ.
Thought AI ruled everything? Think again! This retro console from the 70s showed that sometimes old school beats new tech. What do you think — will AI ever learn to play chess better than Atari? Drop a comment, maybe Atari’s got more tricks up its sleeve!
