TwentyQuestions

Description

TwentyQuestions is an environment for evaluating agents on playing the classic Twenty Questions game against an LLM gamemaster. This environment wraps the TwentyQuestions implementation from TextArena, a framework for text-based game environments.

Capabilities

• Strategic question formulation to narrow search space
• Binary search and deductive reasoning
• Information-efficient questioning strategies
• Testing knowledge representation and category understanding

Compute Requirements

TwentyQuestions 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:

• TwentyQuestions-v0
• TwentyQuestions-v0-train
• TwentyQuestions-v0-raw
• TwentyQuestions-v0-hardcore
• TwentyQuestions-v0-hardcore-train
• TwentyQuestions-v0-hardcore-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:

• send_message(message): Ask a yes-or-no question, or guess the word with [answer].

Time Horizon

TwentyQuestions is a multi-turn environment.

Environment Difficulty

Medium. Twenty Questions requires strategic questioning, category reasoning, and efficient search space reduction. Success depends on formulating informative yes-or-no questions.

Other Environment Requirements

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

Safety

Agents in TwentyQuestions interact only with a word guessing 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}
}