OpenAI Universe

The core idea underlying OpenAI Universe (available at https://github.com/openai/universe) is to wrap general GUI applications into an RL environment using the same core classes provided by Gym. To achieve this, it uses the VNC protocol to connect with the VNC server running inside the Docker (a standard method running lightweight containers) container, exposing the mouse and keyboard actions to the RL agent and providing the GUI application image as an observation.

The reward is provided by an external small rewarder daemon running inside the same container and giving the agent the scalar reward value based on this rewarder judgement. It is possible to launch several containers locally, or over the network, to gather episodes data in parallel, in the same way that we started several Atari emulators to increase the convergence of the asynchronous advantage actor-critic (A3C) method in Chapter 13, Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic. The architecture is illustrated...