The Noah's Ark Test: Qwen4-Max Built the Best of Four Arks — With a Hole in the Bow

Australian blogger Michael Leung paid for a Token Plan subscription and gave Qwen4-Max-Preview the same brief he gave Kimi K3.1 Pro last month: build an interactive 3D Noah's Ark in a single HTML page. His verdict is blunt: this is the best of the four arks he has tested — but the bow has a hole in it. Method first: this is a one-task hands-on test, not a benchmark; the author recorded no time, credits used or follow-up prompts, and gives no cost figure.

The build: ~1,660 lines and 90 KB in one file

A single Three.js file (via CDN), about 1,660 lines and 90 KB. It opens on a title card with a Genesis verse and a "Step Aboard" button, then the ark sails into view. A curved wooden hull, a two-storey cabin with lit windows, a flag, seven animal pairs on deck (giraffes, elephants, zebras and more), a rainbow behind it and a compass in the corner that turns as you orbit.

The side panel, "Ship's Controls", changes everything live: the heavens (time of day, rainfall, wind, sea mist, a rainbow switch), the deep (swell height, from calm to rough), ark and crew (number of animal pairs, lantern glow, a dove you can release, a wireframe "shipwright's view"), and helm and lens (auto-orbit, orbit speed, render quality). There are also Shuffle, Reset and Save view buttons, and keyboard shortcuts (Space for the dove, R to shuffle, S to save). A captain's log in the corner writes a new line as the weather changes: at 22:00 with full rain and wind, it reads "The windows of heaven are open. Hold to the helm."

The sound: no audio files, all generated in the browser

The part the author liked most is the sound. Every sound is synthesised live in the browser with the Web Audio API — no audio files at all: the sea, the rain, the wind, the hull creaking, thunder and the dove. Move a slider and the picture and the sound change together. Kimi's swarm ark had a soundscape too, but its sound did not follow the controls; this one is wired in.

The flaw: the bow and the stern never close

The two sides of the hull do not meet at the front, so you can see into the deck from outside; the back has the same open gap. Easy to miss while the camera orbits, impossible to unsee once spotted. The author left it as it came out, hole included, so readers can judge it themselves. Funnily enough, Kimi K3.1 Pro's first ark made the same mistake, and only closed it after the author sent a screenshot. Two different models, same hole: 3D geometry is still where these models slip — and no benchmark score would tell you that.

Everything else passed the author's checks: the page loaded without errors on desktop and at phone width (390 pixels), the controls changed the scene, and the layout moved the controls below the 3D view on a phone.

Side by side: four arks

Qwen 3.7 Plus (October): a brown box on a blue sea, a row of yellow windows, a red flag, a few clouds, a dove and a rainbow, draggable orbit — and that is about it. 309 lines of code, and the bow is a strange wedge sticking out of the box: "a toy".

Kimi K3.1 Pro (October 26): tours, hotspots, boarding animals, storm and night — the features are all there, but the hull is boxy and the animals simple; the first version's bow was open too, fixed after a screenshot.

Kimi K3.1 Pro swarm (October 27): four Bible chapters, verses, sound, flood and rainbow — the best storyteller of the four, but the weakest 3D.

Qwen4-Max-Preview (November 12): animal pairs, live weather, sea mist, a captain's log, procedural sound and a wireframe view; open gap at front and back. The author's verdict: the best of the four, and the one he would show people first.