This doesn't feel like a "reasoning" challenge. The mental skill required to solve most of these seems to be the ability to loop over all known members of a category like "popular brand names" or "well-known actors" and see if they fit the clue. As a human, you'd expect to fail either because you didn't know a category member (e.g. as a non-American I have no idea WTF "Citgo" is; I could never get the answer to the f…
I had the same thought. It reminds me of solving Project Euler problems, where there is often an obvious naive approach which is guaranteed to produce the correct answer but would consume prohibitive memory/compute resources to execute to completion. I suspect the models would perform much better if prompted to formulate a strategy for efficiently solving these challenges rather than solving them directly… which indicates a direction for potential improvement I suppose.