Minesweeper

Description

Minesweeper is an environment for evaluating agents on spatial reasoning, probabilistic inference, and strategic exploration. This environment wraps the Minesweeper implementation from TextArena, a framework for text-based game environments.

Capabilities

• Probabilistic reasoning under uncertainty
• Spatial pattern recognition and inference
• Strategic decision-making with risk assessment
• Constraint satisfaction from partial information

Compute Requirements

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

License

MIT.

Tasks

There are two splits: train (600 tasks) and test (600 tasks). Each split contains 50 tasks across each of 12 variants:

• Minesweeper-v0
• Minesweeper-v0-train
• Minesweeper-v0-raw
• Minesweeper-v0-small
• Minesweeper-v0-small-train
• Minesweeper-v0-small-raw
• Minesweeper-v0-medium
• Minesweeper-v0-medium-train
• Minesweeper-v0-medium-raw
• Minesweeper-v0-hard
• Minesweeper-v0-hard-train
• Minesweeper-v0-hard-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:

• reveal_cell(row, column): Reveal a cell on the minesweeper grid at the given row and column (0-indexed). Numbers show adjacent mine count. Hitting a mine ends the game.

Time Horizon

Minesweeper is a multi-turn environment.

Environment Difficulty

This environment ranges from moderate to very challenging depending on the variant. Board size and mine density increase from small to hard variants, requiring increasingly sophisticated probabilistic reasoning.

Other Environment Requirements

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

Safety

Agents in Minesweeper interact only with a puzzle 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}
}