ByteSized32: A Corpus and Challenge Task for Generating Task-Specific World Models Expressed as Text Games

In this work we examine the ability of language models to generate explicit world models of scientific and common-sense reasoning tasks by framing this as a problem of generating text-based games. To support this, we introduce ByteSized32, a corpus of 32 highly-templated text games written in Python totaling 24k lines of code, each centered around a particular task, and paired with a set of 16 unseen text game specifications for evaluation. We propose a suite of automatic and manual metrics for assessing simulation validity, compliance with task specifications, playability, winnability, and alignment with the physical world. In a single-shot evaluation of GPT-4 on this simulation-as-code-generation task, we find it capable of producing runnable games in 27% of cases, highlighting the difficulty of this challenge task. We discuss areas of future improvement, including GPT-4's apparent capacity to perform well at simulating near canonical task solutions, with performance dropping off as simulations include distractors or deviate from canonical solutions in the action space.