wincon-research/tis100-bench

TIS-100 Bench

TIS-100 Bench: LLMs Push the Pareto Frontier in Programming Puzzle Games. Read the article.

16 LLMs played all 47 puzzles of the programming game TIS-100 plus 8 community tournament puzzles (55 in all), with 10 to 45 minutes per puzzle and no access to the community leaderboard. They found 133 new Pareto-frontier points on 18 of 55 puzzles, including 3 outright cycle records. This release has all 3,714 programs on the models' Pareto frontiers, with their scores.

Also on GitHub: wincon-research/tis100-bench (one plain file per program).

Leaderboard

#	Model	Puzzles with new frontier points	Solved	Record proximity
1	Opus 5.5	11	55 / 55	77.2
2	GPT-6 Astra	11	55 / 55	78.0
3	Gemini 4 Argon	8	54 / 55	76.2
4	Sonnet 5.5	7	53 / 55	69.9
5	GPT-6.1 Sol	6	54 / 55	75.6
6	Fable 5.1	5	52 / 55	70.2
7	Kimi K3.1 Pro	2	52 / 55	64.6
8	Gemini 3.8 Flash	1	53 / 55	66.0
9	Muse Wonder 1.0	1	49 / 55	58.8
10	Haiku 5.5	1	45 / 55	53.7
11	GLM-5.3	1	30 / 55	35.5
12	Grok 4.7	0	44 / 55	50.1
13	DeepSeek V4.1 Flash	0	40 / 55	46.8
14	Muse Spark 1.3	0	39 / 55	45.1
15	gpt-6-luna	0	39 / 55	42.8
16	MiMo-V2.6-Pro	0	10 / 55	12.8

Snapshot 2026-11-03-v5, one attempt per model and puzzle.

Highlight

On the tournament puzzle Undecimal Twin Rounder (SPEC44149538), Opus 5.5 cut the community cycle record from 2,694 to 1,918 (programs/SPEC44149538/opus/SPEC44149538.1918-8-88.txt). A player then took that program to 1,744; the leaderboard now credits LongingForRest/opus-5-5.

Data

programs (default), one row per program on a model's Pareto frontier:

Field	Description
puzzle_id, puzzle, difficulty	In-game puzzle ID, name and difficulty (easy, medium, hard)
model	Model that wrote the program
cycles, nodes, instructions	The program's scores, as TIS-100 reports them
new_frontier_point	True if it is a new Pareto-frontier point (see Method)
file	Path of the same program in the GitHub repo
program	Program text in TIS-100 save format (@0 … blocks)

models: the leaderboard above as a table.

from datasets import load_dataset
programs = load_dataset("wincon-research/tis100-bench", "programs", split="train")
new = programs.filter(lambda r: r["new_frontier_point"])

Method

Each model had one scored attempt per puzzle (pass@1): find a working program, then keep improving it on all three of the game's scores (cycles, nodes, instructions). Time limits were 10, 30 and 45 minutes for easy, medium and hard puzzles. Models had no access to the community leaderboard.

Every program on a model's final Pareto frontier was replayed in a fresh game and run against 100,000 random test inputs in TIS-100-CXX. A point counts as a new frontier point when it passed all of those tests and no program on the community leaderboard (frozen at commit e311401) is as good or better on all three scores. Record proximity is the community's best score divided by the model's best, averaged over the three scores and all 55 puzzles (×100; unsolved puzzles count as 0).

186 rows are flagged as new frontier points. Different models sometimes found the same point, or one model's point beats another's, so the combined frontier has 133 distinct new points.

Full methods, analysis and an interactive Pareto explorer are in the article.

Run a program

Save a row's program to a file named like its file. Built-in puzzles are recognised from the file name. Community tournament puzzles (SPEC…) need their Lua spec from the leaderboard bot and a TIS-100-CXX build with Lua support.

TIS-100-CXX -r 100000 programs/00150/opus/00150.83-8-8.txt
TIS-100-CXX -L 44149538.lua -r 100000 programs/SPEC44149538/opus/SPEC44149538.1918-8-88.txt
# validation successful
# score: 1918/8/88

License and credit

MIT. Credit programs as "Wincon (model name)". TIS-100 is a trademark of Zachtronics; this project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Zachtronics.

Research teams can ask us for the RL environment and episode traces: hello@wincon.dev.

Citation

@misc{wincon2026tis100bench,
  title  = {TIS-100 Bench: LLMs Push the Pareto Frontier in Programming Puzzle Games},
  author = {{Wincon}},
  year   = {2026},
  month  = nov,
  url    = {https://tis-100.wincon.dev/},
  note   = {Benchmark snapshot 2026-11-03-v5}
}