Just to add some details, the Los Alamos Chess people acknowledged that theirs was not the first such computer program, that Alan Turing had previously done created one. Presumably Turing's program didn't ever beat a human, though.
I knew one of the authors, Mark Wells. After he retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory he moved, temporarily, to Las Cruces, NM, to be head of the CS department at New Mexico State University, so became my boss as a student employee in the department. I don't recall his authorship of the chess program being mentioned by any of the profs or grad students (it was a very small department). When I moved to Los Alamos many years later I discovered that he lived just down the street--they'd kept their house in Los Alamos while in Las Cruces and had returned (for the skiing, he said).
The first article linked below has some details about the chess program not in the Wikipedia article.
Chess was his (serious) hobby; his research was in programming language design, specifically concerning type theory.
I and, coincidentally and separately a long-time friend, were homeless for a year while undergraduates. It was a financial necessity to stay in school full time (while working part-time) and not take out student loans. That was over 40 years ago. We both went on get Ph.D.s and become part of the middle class. As homeless students we were a rarity, but it wasn't unheard of--a former roommate student camped out of his car for half a year--just couldn't give up that car.
Last line, absolutely correct. Spew super-superficially-plausible nonsense to technical questions. Tell it it's wrong and it will either (or both) spew only superficially plausible nonsense and apologize that it was wrong.
Right now it's a great party trick and no more, IMO. And if one gets into more "sociological" questions it spews 1/3 factoids scraped from the web, 1/3 what could only be called moralizing, and 1/3 vomit-inducing PC/woke boilerplate. My only lack of understanding of its training is how the latter 2/3 were programmed in. I want only the first 1/3 supposedly-factual without the latter 2/3 insipid preaching. If a human responded like that they'd have no friends, groupies, adherents, or respect from anyone, including children.
https://discover.lanl.gov/publications/at-the-bradbury/2023-...