Abstract
This paper examines the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) from a novel perspective, focusing on their ability to operate within formally specified, rule-governed environments. We evaluate four LLMs (Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash variants, Llama 3.3 70B and GPT-OSS 120B) on a suite of forward-simulation tasks-including next / multistep state formulation, and legal action generation-