I would not expect someone without a good knowledge of both javascript and the Ising model of ferromagnetism to make that in one hour. Especially now that google search is more and more crap, just looking for info would take longer.
Is this not just a cellular automaton? That's well within the usual range of college sophomore lab assignments.
To be honest the student may not necessarily care what the Isling model is, but they don't have to and neither does an LLM. It takes a very modest amount of code to apply some rules and update a grid of pixels. At least when I was in school it was totally normal to expect students to make something like this in an hour.
It's actually kind of ironic that in this case such a simple project now means the opposite of what it did back then. Students got these assignments as a form of encouragement to show that their skills were immediately useful and that more "serious" science need not be so scary.
