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Citrix Engineer Challenges ChatGPT in Atari Chess Showdown

Citrix

Business Honor
17 June, 2025

Robert Caruso, a senior infrastructure engineer at Citrix, recently challenged OpenAI’s ChatGPT to a game of chess against a 1979 Atari 2600.

Robert Caruso, a senior infrastructure engineer at Citrix, recently challenged OpenAI’s ChatGPT against a 1979 Atari 2600 in a game of chess. The results were far from what one might expect from one of the most advanced AI models in the world.

Caruso, an expert at integrating legacy systems and cloud-native technology, wanted to see how ChatGPT, renowned for its conversational skill, would perform on the strategic nuance of chess. Caruso used an emulator to load the Video Chess game from the Atari 2600, a platform launched over 40 years ago. Owing to its advanced AI for text generation, the performance of ChatGPT in this simple chess game was abysmal.

"ChatGPT got rooks and bishops mixed up, overlooked simple pawn forks, and forgot where pieces were," Caruso revealed in a LinkedIn post. Despite a switch to normal chess notation, the AI committed errors that would have brought ridicule in any 3rd-grade chess club. After playing for 90 minutes, ChatGPT asked to start over several times, obviously flustered by its performance.

Although this may seem counterintuitive, the findings are intuitive upon reflection of the character of ChatGPT. Unlike specific-purpose chess engines such as IBM's Deep Blue, ChatGPT is formulated for language processing, not strategy or gameplay reasoning.

The experiment gained momentum on social media soon enough, with most noting that even 46-year-old technology such as the Atari 2600 is not yet obsolete. For Caruso, the exercise served a great lesson: legacy technology has its appeal, and sometimes even newer AI still has a long way to go in learning areas beyond its programming.

Caruso's experiment facilitated discussion not just about AI but also about where legacy and new systems meet in the modern world of technology.