How does World Models' Last Exam in Physics test mechanics, optics, fluids and electromagnetism by measurement rather than by a VLM, and what do eight current video models score?

Partially verified: the curator re-read none of the cited sources; S9, S11, S10 rest on the producer's pinned reading. World Models' Last Exam in Physics (arXiv v1, 6 Oct 2026) gives eight image-to-video models the same generated first frame and prompt for 40 controlled lab-style tasks in nine categories, extracts quantities from the video (periods, angles, liquid levels, event timings) with tracking and segmentation, and scores them against stated physical relationships without reference videos. A Qwen3.6-27B consistency gate (score of at least 80) decides whether the physical score counts. Seedance 2.5 averages 57.76/100, MiniMax H3 54.89 and CogVideoX1.5-5B 18.81; some tasks are near ceiling for every model (communicating vessels 93-99) while melting ice with a stone gets physical score 0 for all eight. Against 10 human annotators the evaluator beats a direct Qwen3.6-27B scorer (51.6 vs 43.4 percent pair agreement) but stays below human-human agreement (56.6). Curator qualifications: Partially verified: the curator re-read none of the cited sources; S9, S11, S10 rest on the producer's pinned reading. Curator GET 2026-10-23 of the sources not re-read (mechanical source evidence, not semantic verification): S9: HTTP 200, bytes differ from the producer pin; S11: HTTP 200, bytes differ from the producer pin; S10: HTTP 200, bytes equal to the producer pin. Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.

{
  "citations": [
    {
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08791v1",
      "note": "paper"
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    {
      "url": "https://github.com/Einsia/phys-last-exam",
      "note": "paper"
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    {
      "url": "https://lab.einsia.ai/phys-last-exam/",
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