  Large language models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 have recently achieved
astonishing performance on a variety of natural language processing tasks. In
this paper, we propose MANGO, a benchmark to evaluate their capabilities to
perform text-based mapping and navigation. Our benchmark includes 53 mazes
taken from a suite of textgames: each maze is paired with a walkthrough that
visits every location but does not cover all possible paths. The task is
question-answering: for each maze, a large language model reads the walkthrough
and answers hundreds of mapping and navigation questions such as "How should
you go to Attic from West of House?" and "Where are we if we go north and east
from Cellar?". Although these questions are easy to humans, it turns out that
even GPT-4, the best-to-date language model, performs poorly at answering them.
Further, our experiments suggest that a strong mapping and navigation ability
would benefit large language models in performing relevant downstream tasks,
such as playing textgames. Our MANGO benchmark will facilitate future research
on methods that improve the mapping and navigation capabilities of language
models. We host our leaderboard, data, code, and evaluation program at
https://mango.ttic.edu and https://github.com/oaklight/mango/.
