Spelling Bee Environment

Overview

Spelling Bee is a two-player competitive game where each player attempts to create the longest possible valid English word using a given set of allowed letters. Players submit their words simultaneously, and the player with the longer valid word wins. The game emphasizes vocabulary skills and strategic letter usage.

Action Space

• Format: Actions are strings representing the player's proposed word, wrapped in square brackets.
• Examples:
  • "[donkey]"
  • "I think a good word would be [apples]"

Observation Space

Observations

Reset Observation:

On reset, each player receives a prompt containing the allowed letters and game instructions. For example:

[GAME]: You are Player 0 in the Spelling Bee Game.
Allowed Letters: a e l m p s
Create the longest possible English word using only the allowed letters. You may use each letter multiple times.
Please wrap your word in square brackets, e.g., '[example]'.
On your turn, simply type your word.

Step Observation: The game provides no step-based observations. This is to make sure that neither player has an unfair advantage.

Gameplay

• Players: 2
• Turns: Each player has one turn to submit their word.
• Allowed Letters: A set of unique lowercase letters randomly generated at the start of the game, configurable via the num_letters parameter.
• Objective: Submit the longest valid English word possible using the allowed letters.
• Rules:
  • Words must be composed only of the allowed letters.
  • Each letter can be used zero, once or multiple times.
  • Words must be valid English (british or us) words.
  • Words must be wrapped in square brackets.

Key Rules

1. Word Composition:

   • Only allowed letters can be used.
   • Each letter can be used multiple times in a word.

2. Word Validation:

   • Words must be recognized as valid English words by standard dictionaries (en_US or en_GB).

3. Submission Format:

   • Words must be enclosed in square brackets, e.g., [example].

4. Game Termination:

   • The game ends after both players have submitted their words and the system has evaluated them

Rewards

Parameters

• num_letters (int):
  • Description: Number of unique allowed letters in the game.
  • Impact: Determines the complexity and difficulty of the game. More letters generally allow for longer and more varied words.

Variants

Troubleshooting

• Missing Enchant Dictionaries:

  • Issue: The Enchant library cannot find the required dictionaries (en_US and en_GB).
  • Solution: Install the necessary Enchant dictionaries. On Ubuntu, you can install them using:

  sudo apt-get install enchant
  sudo apt-get install myspell-en-us myspell-en-gb
  

• Game Not Terminating Properly:

  • Issue: The game does not end after both players have submitted their words.
  • Solution: Check the implementation of the step method to ensure it correctly identifies when both words have been submitted and terminates the game accordingly.

Version History

• v0
  • Initial release

Contact

If you have questions or face issues with this specific environment, please reach out directly to Guertlerlo@cfar.a-star.edu.sg