Why does the Coin Collector environment always start from kitchen

[elvesdynam]

Why does the Coin Collector environment always start from kitchen? I created 20 games using seed 0-19, the initial obs always start at the kitchen, and some of the games already has the coin on the floor. This is very different to Textworld environment.

[PeterAJansen]

Hi @elvesdynam , thanks for your note.

You are correct, the Coin Collector (and indeed Cooking World and TextWorld Commonsense) reimplementations in TextWorldExpress all use the same map generator, and this has the agents starting from the same starting location (the kitchen):

TextWorldExpress/simulator/src/main/scala/textworldexpress/games/CoinGame.scala

Line 59 in 2ad075f

var agentLocation:Room = locations(0)

The TextWorldExpress implementations of these games are a little different than their original implementations, and one of the changes is the map generator being the same across the environments (so that we could hold the navigation challenge the same, so that seeing differences in performance for a given model on the TWX versions of Coin Collector, CookingWorld, and TWC with the same map generation parameters should detect performance differences in the main task rather than the navigation subtask.

That being said, I can see cases where having the same starting location would be suboptimal, and changing this should only be a few lines of code. @MarcCote What do you think? Should we make this a parameter (e.g. a boolean flag on initialization that lets the user set to the current behavior (kitchen starting location) or a random starting location), or should we just do a random starting location and bump the pip version?

[MarcCote]

I think adding a flag is better and more backward compatible. Also, having TWX implementation more aligned with those of TW would be great too but I don't have the bandwidth for that at the moment unfortunately.