Yes everyone is doing that on benchmarks but they are still somewhat useful and the likes arc agi even more, though we are not be able to quantize exactly how much better they are getting they are still necessary. For arc agi these are some big gains by which ever way the went about it, since everyone also has been trying to max it for the last 3 years but we do need to come up with better benchmarks/evals like arc tried.
Its almost certain that it was, but the purpose of this puzzle benchmark is that it shouldn't really be possible just to be memorized by the amount of variations that can be created and other criteria detailed in it.
Yes you can build your dataset of n puzzles but it was still really hard for any system to achieve any scores, it even beats specialized one for this just one task and this puzzles shouldn't really be possible just to be memorized by the amount of variations that can be created.