The comment more likely means the harness source was read, not memory from a previous run and the first few turns of bp35 appear to be a cold start.

Sure none of this is certain without the source.

I do believe the authors that this schema significantly improves over the base, particularly given that it took 22x simulated turns over 14 hours, which is moving the trial and error to context rather than to game. I also don’t doubt there is some contamination.

Regardless, the approach is sound and I do believe it would significantly improve scores, even if that was +20-30 over baseline (49% in this case) it does imply the benchmark is measuring the harness more than the model.