How To Play vs ChatGPT in Chess – ALL Methods Covered

AI is becoming a tool that people use more and more, and reading this article would mean you want to know how to play vs ChatGPT in Chess. Well, you’re not alone! ChatGPT can be used in many ways in regards to chess. You can ask it to analyze moves, study new strategies or even play against it.

What is ChatGPT and Are There Any Limits For Playing Chess Against It

ChatGPT is a language model and it can interact with you through text as if it’s a human. It also has vast amounts of knowledge, so you can use it as a chess partner. The limit here is that it is not really connected to some external online chess system, so you would need to tell it in text where you moved your piece, and ask it for it’s next move. For this to work, you would either need to have a screen with a chess game for two people, where you can move both white and black pieces, or have a physical board. Algebraic Notation should be used, which is just a fancy way of saying keeping track of what moves where.

A website I found that you can use after a quick google search is: https://www.chessmultiplayer.com/; Of course, feel free to use any other site that you prefer.

If you have the premium ChatGPT version, there is a plugin that you can use to play against. It will also show you the pieces on the board after each move! Read on to learn more.

How To Play vs ChatGPT in Chess – The Prompt

When it comes to communicating with ChatGPT and any AI for that matter, the prompt is the most important part. The prompt is basically the request you make to the chatbot on what you would like to happen in the conversation. You can use a general prompt like:

Let’s play chess. I move pawn to e4, what is your next move?

Although this is simple and easy to get started, the problem is that you didn’t give it any specific guidelines here. So more than likely, what might happen in the next few moves is that it might make an illegal move, or forget where the pieces were and so on. The best flow here would be to give a detailed prompt of the situation and what you would like it to do, to avoid any pitfalls.

Let’s play a game of chess. We will follow the standard rules of chess. We will use Algebraic Notation. I will be playing as white, and you will be playing as black. I will start first after you acknowledge you understand my prompt. You will be doing your best to win the game. After each move from both of us, you will summarize all the moves up to that point with PGN to make sure we keep track of the progress. If I make an illegal move, you will let me know, and I will make a new move. If you understand the rules, reply with: “I understand, let’s play a game of chess.”

We are doing a couple of things here. Firstly, we are asking it to adhere to the rules of chess. Secondly, setting the roles – black and white. Making sure that it actually tries to win the game. We are asking it to summarize the moves after each move, so it can keep track of where it is – a lot of the time it will forget where it was and make illegal moves otherwise. Lastly, to make sure our prompt is understood, we give it a clear reply it should answer with.

How To Play vs ChatGPT in Chess – ChatGPT 3.5 (free)

From my experience the free version of ChatGPT, or ChatGPT3.5 are really bad at chess. It can make moves alright, but its ability to reason and keep track of what is going on is not good. With the above prompt, you may need to ask it a few times to make sure it actually makes a move, or that it keeps track of the game. I personally wouldn’t recommend to play vs ChatGPT 3.5 in chess. as you might be left with a bot that is trying to make an illegal move in the middle of a game, despite your best efforts.

How To Play vs ChatGPT in Chess – ChatGPT Plus

Playing with the premium version of the chatbot, GPT 4 is a pleasure. It can follow instructions and keep track of the board just fine without any issues. The only downfall here is the fact that you only have 25 messages per 3 hours, so the game might be really, really long before you can complete the game:

How To Play vs ChatGPT in Chess – ChatGPT Plus Plugin

To my surprise, it turns out that there is a plugin that allows you to play chess with ChatGPT plus as well. All moves that you make are sent to this Chess plugin, and it returns a reply with a visual representation of the board after each move. To play with it, follow the below steps.

Step 1: Install the chess plugin. Open a new chat with ChatGPT 4, click on the GPT-4 icon, then choose the Plugins option:

Step 2: Click on the plugins subsection, and then the plugin store at the bottom:

Step 3: Install the plugin:

Step 4: Make sure it is enabled, and start a chat:

Step 5: Ask to play chess and follow the instructions:

Step 6: Play chess vs ChatGPT:

How To Play vs ChatGPT in Chess – OpenAI API

You can play against ChatGPT through the OpenAI API. The same situations with the webmodel applies here – I would advise to play against GPT 4. With the API you have a much larger context to play with (up to 32K right now), and do not have the 25 messages per 3 hours limit, so you can definitely enjoy some advanced games with it. There are even some scripts that come ready, so you do not have to code everything up. A quick google search came up with this link: https://github.com/notnil/chess-gpt

If you would like to code your own chess playing script, and are not sure where to begin, you can read my beginner friendly guide on using the OpenAI API: How To Upload A Document To ChatGPT Using The OpenAI API

Summary:

If you would like to try your hand at playing vs ChatGPT in chess, you have lots of options. I believe I have covered them all here, at least at the time of writing of the article. You can play against the free version of ChatGPT, but I believe it is too limited to be able to have a normal good game against it. Your best bet would be to try against ChatGPT 4, as it has the advanced reasoning capabilities to play a full game of chess. You can even try your luck with the API, and choose all sorts of different models.