Playing Dumb: How a Chess Transformer Simulates Users Across Skill Levels· 棋类模型模拟用户行为

Generative models increasingly simulate users at different skill levels in education and AI evaluation. Yet it remains unclear whether lower-skill behavior reflects less internal knowledge or a different use of retained knowledge. This distinction is difficult to study in natural language, where proficiency and relevant knowledge are hard to measure. In this work, we study Maia-2, a chess transformer that predicts human moves conditioned on player skill, using quantitative skill ratings and deterministically labeled chess concepts. We hold board positions and model weights fixed and analyze positions where skill conditioning changes the prediction from a blunder to the best move. First, we measure encoded knowledge by training probes to predict the presence of 172 chess concepts from Maia-