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.
