It should be noted that MaxSAT 2024 did not include z3, as with many competitions. It’s possible (I’d argue likely) that the agent picked up on techniques from Z3 or some other non-competing solver, rather than actually discovering some novel approach.
Z3 is capable (it’s an SMT solver, not just SAT), but it’s not very fast at boolean satifiability and not at all competitive with modern SOTA SAT solvers. Try comparing it to Chaff or Glucose e.g.
as its from 2024 (MaxSAT was not held in 2025), its quite likely all the solvers are in the training data. so the interesting part here is the instances for which we actually got better costs that what is currently known (in the best-cost.csv) file.
Funnily, this was precisely the question I had after posting this (and the topic of an LLM disagreement discussed in another thread). Turns out not, but sibling comment is another confounding factor.
