You don't have to do much statistical analysis to figure out what is meant by the token string "cat under a tree". However you need to do an enormous amount to encode any permutation of pixels that show a cat under a tree from the set of all possible pixels arrangements that illustrate that (along with the massive fringes of ambiguity).
Basically current gen LLMs apparently do spatial reasoning the way they seemingly do everything else: by reference to previous example. I didn't see them work out which known example to use for a given problem until specifically prompted, in my case by accident.
That's not what I said happened though. It didn't solve the problem (for weeks) until I (accidentally) told it which example it happened to know was relevant, and then it solved it in hours.
Only a fraction of the games can be solved by Sol, generally at sub-human efficiency in terms of turns, AND at a cost of >$10,000 per game.