LightsOut

Description

LightsOut is an environment for evaluating agents on spatial reasoning and logic puzzle solving tasks. This environment wraps the LightsOut implementation from TextArena, a framework for text-based game environments.

Capabilities

• Spatial reasoning and pattern recognition
• Understanding cascading effects of actions
• Strategic planning to reach goal states
• Logic puzzle solving with constraint satisfaction

Compute Requirements

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

License

MIT.

Tasks

There are two splits: train (150 tasks) and test (150 tasks). Each split contains 50 tasks across each of 3 variants:

• LightsOut-v0
• LightsOut-v0-train
• LightsOut-v0-raw

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:

• toggle_light(row, column): Toggle a light at the given position (0-indexed). This flips the light and all orthogonally adjacent lights. Goal: turn all lights off.

Time Horizon

LightsOut is a multi-turn environment.

Environment Difficulty

This environment presents moderate to challenging difficulty, requiring agents to understand and account for the cascading effects of toggling lights while working toward a specific goal state.

Other Environment Requirements

There are no further environment requirements; LightsOut works out of the box without any secrets or API keys.

Safety

Agents in LightsOut interact only with a logic puzzle 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}
}