I actually managed to replicate the new SOTA for circle packing in unit squares as found in the alphaevole paper - 2.635 for 26 circles in a unit square. Took about 800 iterations to find the best program which itself uses an optimisation phase and running it lead to the optimal packaging in one of its runs.
How many tokens did it take to generate the 800 versions of the code?
Checked my openrouter stats, it took ~3M tokens but that involved quite a few runs of various experiments.