I would strongly (>95% confidence) predict no. But not so much because there are no general rules but because the riddles are basically reverse-engineering algorithms aka riddles.
I wonder whether the ability to solve these kinds of riddle games is a fire alarm for AGI or at least another bigger milestone.
Would any current reinforcement learning algorithm be able to solve this game?
I would strongly (>95% confidence) predict no. But not so much because there are no general rules but because the riddles are basically reverse-engineering algorithms aka riddles.
I wonder whether the ability to solve these kinds of riddle games is a fire alarm for AGI or at least another bigger milestone.
Five years later, there is significant progress:
Baba Is AI: Break the Rules to Beat the Benchmark (6/2024) showed limited success on the first 40 levels.
BALROG: Benchmarking Agentic LLM and VLM Reasoning On Games (site last updated 2/2026) has made significant progress on the same levels:
Gemini 3.1 Pro, text-only: 90.0%
Gemini 3.1 Pro with “thinking”: 83.3%
Claude Opus 4.5: 50.8%
Grok 4: 45.8%
GPT-5, minimal thinking: 25.8%
Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental, vision-language: 53.3%
But note that there are much harder levels later. The first levels just introduce the first mechanics and apply them.
This type of problem has been used to create BabaBench (which is inspired but different than the game) and LLMs struggle with it (solving up to 10% where a planner can solve 50%: Code over Words: Overcoming Semantic Inertia via Code-Grounded Reasoning
The general game is actually undecidable.