Checkers

Description

Checkers is an ORS environment for evaluating agents on playing the classic Checkers game against an LLM opponent. This environment wraps the Checkers implementation from TextArena, a framework for text-based game environments.

Capabilities

• Strategic piece movement and jump mechanics
• Multi-jump capture sequences and chain planning
• King promotion and bidirectional movement reasoning
• Competitive two-player gameplay against an LLM opponent

Compute Requirements

Checkers does not require a sandbox. It has minimal compute requirements.

License

MIT.

Tasks

There are two splits: train (300 tasks) and test (300 tasks). Each split contains 50 tasks across each of 6 variants:

• Checkers-v0
• Checkers-v0-long
• Checkers-v0-long-raw
• Checkers-v0-long-train
• Checkers-v0-raw
• Checkers-v0-train

Each task is seeded for reproducibility.

Reward Structure

This is a sparse reward environment. Rewards are mapped from TextArena's native range of {-1, 0, 1} to {0.0, 0.5, 1.0} via (raw + 1) / 2.

We do not use LLM graders for this environment; reward is determined programmatically.

Data

Game state is generated procedurally by the TextArena engine using seeded randomness. No external data files are required.

Tools

Agents are given a single tool:

• move_checker(from_row, from_col, to_row, to_col): Move a checker piece from one position to another. Provide from_row, from_col, to_row, to_col (0-indexed).

Time Horizon

Checkers is a multi-turn environment.

Environment Difficulty

Medium

Other Environment Requirements

This environment requires an OpenAI API key (passed via secrets) to power the LLM opponent.

Safety

Agents in Checkers interact only with a board game and have no access to external systems, the internet, or sensitive data. The environment does not present safety risks.

Citations

@software{textarena2024,
  author    = {Guertler, Leon and Banting, Wilfried and Pignatelli, Eduardo},
  title     = {TextArena},
  year      = {2024},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  url       = {https://github.com/LeonGuertler/TextArena}
}