BoxesWorld

A scalable MOMDP that mirrors a box-searching task for an item. As a MOMDP, the agent will always know their location (represented by a Point), but their belief will vary over the contents of the given boxes.

Suppose that:

• $B = \{ \text{Box(1, 5)}, \text{Box(5, 5)}, \text{Box(5, 1)} \}$
• $L = \{ \text{Point(1, 1)}, \text{Point(1, 5)}, \text{Point(5, 5)}, \text{Point(5, 1)} \}$
• $I = \{ 🍋, 🍓, 🥝, 🍍 \}$

Note: $\text{Point(1, 1)}$ is the spawn location.

• Action space ($\mathcal{A}$): [[Move(box) for box in B]..., Take()]
  • Move(box) will move the agent from its current location to the targeted box.
  • Take() will take the contents at the current box. At the spawn location, this is an invalid action which does not transition to a new state.
• Observation space ($\mathcal{O}$): [item for item in I]

  • item only has the requirement that it's a Symbol. Thus, the agent may observe whatever items you specify are allowed to be in the boxes.

    Note that BoxesWorld does not support items only being in certain boxes (e.g., lemons (🍋) are only allowed in odd-number boxes).

• State space ($\mathcal{S}$): Each state is a known location drawn from $L$ and potential box contents, drawn from $I$ spread across the given boxes, thus there are $|B|^{|I|}$ combinations of items $I$ in boxes $B$. The state-space is always $|L| \times |B|^{|I|}$ where $|L|$ is the number of locations, $|B|$ is the number of boxes, and $|I|$ is the number of items.

Example code in examples/boxes=3-fruits=🍋🍓🥝🍍

The world is rotated by 45 degrees to accentuate costs, but is set in a 5x5 grid-like world. Specifically, there are 3 boxes at (1, 5), (5, 5), and (5, 1). Each box may contain only one fruit, but collectively there may be any combination of fruits.

• Action space: [Move(1), Move(2), Move(3), Take()]
• Observation space: [:🍋, :🍓, :🥝, :🍍]
• State space:

  states = map([Point(1, 1), Point(1, 5), Point(5, 5), Point(5, 1)]) do location
    map(product(ITEMS, ITEMS, ITEMS)) do (box1, box2, box3)
      return State(location, [box1, box2, box3])
    end
  end |> flatten |> collect

Note that Point(1, 1) is the spawn location – this is where initial beliefs may be modified so represent non-uniform initial beliefs!

On the left, we have an agent in a 3-box world with a kiwi (🥝), lemon (🍋), and strawberry (🍓) in boxes 1, 2, and 3, respectively. The agent cannot observe the contents of the box until it visits the box.

On the right, we have an agent in a similar world but with lemons (🍋) in boxes 1 and 2, and a kiwi (🥝) in box 3. The agent took actions Move(2), Move(3), Take(). Thus, the agent observed a lemon (🍋) in Box 2, then a strawberry (🍓) in Box 3, and took the strawberry (🍓) in Box 3.