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Sudoku-Bench: Evaluating creative reasoning with Sudoku variants

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arxiv 2505.16135 v1 pith:RG6DV36N submitted 2025-05-22 cs.AI cs.CLcs.LG

Sudoku-Bench: Evaluating creative reasoning with Sudoku variants

classification cs.AI cs.CLcs.LG
keywords reasoningsudokuvariantspuzzlesudoku-benchcreativellmslogical
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Existing reasoning benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) frequently fail to capture authentic creativity, often rewarding memorization of previously observed patterns. We address this shortcoming with Sudoku-Bench, a curated benchmark of challenging and unconventional Sudoku variants specifically selected to evaluate creative, multi-step logical reasoning. Sudoku variants form an unusually effective domain for reasoning research: each puzzle introduces unique or subtly interacting constraints, making memorization infeasible and requiring solvers to identify novel logical breakthroughs (``break-ins''). Despite their diversity, Sudoku variants maintain a common and compact structure, enabling clear and consistent evaluation. Sudoku-Bench includes a carefully chosen puzzle set, a standardized text-based puzzle representation, and flexible tools compatible with thousands of publicly available puzzles -- making it easy to extend into a general research environment. Baseline experiments show that state-of-the-art LLMs solve fewer than 15\% of puzzles unaided, highlighting significant opportunities to advance long-horizon, strategic reasoning capabilities.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

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