The evaluation challenged models to solve 55 total levels across standard puzzles and community tournaments using text-based inspection and diagnostic tools. Passing programs required both a full game replay and 100,000 successful tests on an independent simulator to confirm generalizability. While top performers discovered new Pareto frontier points, overall success varied dramatically across the field, with the lowest-scoring model resolving only 10 puzzles.
Key points
Writing functional code and optimizing instructions, cycles, and node counts represent di…: Writing functional code and optimizing instructions, cycles, and node counts represent distinct capabilities among tested systems.
Rigorous generalization testing via 100,000 simulator runs ensured submitted assembly cod…: Rigorous generalization testing via 100,000 simulator runs ensured submitted assembly code worked beyond standard test cases.
Human players still retained an edge by reviewing and improving upon the majority of the…: Human players still retained an edge by reviewing and improving upon the majority of the top models' solutions.
Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1
TIS-100 Bench: LLMs Push the Pareto Frontier in Programming Puzzle Games
Twelve nodes. Two registers per node. Fifteen lines of code. In TIS-100, even multiplying two numbers is a small engineering project, and players have spent a decade optimizing these programs on a public community leaderboard. We gave 16 LLMs the game and its manual, withheld the leaderboard, and told them to keep improving.
Within days, players picked up the models’ programs and improved on most of them.
Each node is a tiny processor, and neighboring nodes have to wait for one another to exchange values. The game scores a working solution on cycles, nodes, and instructions, and you start wondering whether one more instruction could disappear. Lower is better, but improving one score can make another worse, so each puzzle has a frontier of tradeoffs instead of one best answer.
Leaderboard
We ran 16 LLMs, covering leading frontier and open-weight models. Every model attempted all 47 puzzles in the game, plus eight community tournament puzzles, in one scored attempt each (pass@1), with 10 to 45 minutes per puzzle, depending…
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