Installing OpenAI Gym

After setting up the working environment, we can now install OpenAI Gym. You can't work on reinforcement learning without using OpenAI Gym, which gives you a variety of environments in which to develop your learning algorithms.

OpenAI (https://openai.com/) is a non-profit research company that is focused on building safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) and ensuring that it benefits humans. OpenAI Gym is a powerful and open source toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms. It provides an interface to varieties of reinforcement learning simulations and tasks, from walking to moon landing, from car racing to playing Atari games. See https://gym.openai.com/envs/ for the full list of environments.We can write agents to interact with OpenAI Gym environments using any numerical computation library, such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or Keras.

How to do it...

There are two ways to install Gym. The first one is to use pip, as follows:

pip install gym

For conda users, remember to install pip first in conda using the following command before installing Gym using pip:

conda install pip

This is because Gym is not officially available in conda as of early 2019.

Another approach is to build from source:

1. First, clone the package directly from its Git repository:

git clone https://github.com/openai/gym

2. Go to the downloaded folder and install Gym from there:

cd gym
pip install -e .

And now you are good to go. Feel free to play around with gym.

3. You can also check the available gym environment by typing the following lines of code:

>>> from gym import envs
>>> print(envs.registry.all())
dict_values([EnvSpec(Copy-v0), EnvSpec(RepeatCopy-v0), EnvSpec(ReversedAddition-v0), EnvSpec(ReversedAddition3-v0), EnvSpec(DuplicatedInput-v0), EnvSpec(Reverse-v0), EnvSpec(CartPole-v0), EnvSpec(CartPole-v1), EnvSpec(MountainCar-v0), EnvSpec(MountainCarContinuous-v0), EnvSpec(Pendulum-v0), EnvSpec(Acrobot-v1), EnvSpec(LunarLander-v2), EnvSpec(LunarLanderContinuous-v2), EnvSpec(BipedalWalker-v2), EnvSpec(BipedalWalkerHardcore-v2), EnvSpec(CarRacing-v0), EnvSpec(Blackjack-v0)
...
...

This will give you a long list of environments if you installed Gym properly. We will play around with some of them in the next recipe, Simulating Atari environments.

How it works...

Compared to the simple pip approach for installing Gym, the second approach provides more flexibility if you want to add new environments and modify Gym itself.

There's more...

You may wonder why we need to test reinforcement learning algorithms on Gym's environments since the actual environments we work in can be a lot different. You will recall that reinforcement learning doesn't make many assumptions about the environment, but it gets to know more about the environment by interacting with it. Also, when comparing the performance of different algorithms, we need to apply them to standardized environments. Gym is a perfect benchmark, covering many versatile and easy-to-use environments. This is similar to the datasets that we often use as benchmarks in supervised and unsupervised learning, such as MNIST, Imagenet, MovieLens, and Thomson Reuters News.

See also

Take a look at the official Gym documentation at https://gym.openai.com/docs/.