Makis Ntouskos

This paper seems very interesting: say you train an LLM to play chess using only transcripts of games of players up to 1000 elo. Is it possible that the model plays better than 1000 elo? (i.e. "transcends" the training data performance?). It seems you get something from nothing, and some information theory arguments that this should be impossible were discussed in conversations I had in the past. But this paper shows this can happen: training on 1000 elo game transcripts and getting an LLM that plays at 1500! Further the authors connect to a clean theoretical framework for why: it's ensembling weak learners, where you get "something from nothing" by averaging the independent mistakes of multiple models. The paper argued that you need enough data diversity and careful temperature sampling for the transcendence to occur. I had been thinking along the same lines but didn't think of using chess as a clean measurable way to scientifically measure this. Fantastic work that I'll read I'll more depth.