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Is this similar to Mutation Testing, where the code being tested is mutated, in order to identify unspecified behavior?

Mutant is a Ruby library for this: https://github.com/mbj/mutant

No, it's much closer to classic fuzz testing, where the test is held constant and the data fed to it is varied. I've been meaning to see if I can figure out a way to use mutation testing to feed into Hypothesis, but it's on the long list of things I'll try "at some point"

could you use something like recently open sourced z3 to assist in finding minimal examples? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concolic_testing)

This is also on the "at some point" list. :-)

Concolic testing is quite hard in Python because of its extremely flexible semantics. I will probably look into doing something with z3 at some point when I need an interesting problem to entertain me, but I don't hold out a massive amount of hope for it being useful.

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