OpenAI Universe
OpenAI Universe is available in OpenAI's GitHub repository https://github.com/openai/universe and its core idea 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 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 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 Actor-Critic (A2C) method in Chapter 11, Asynchronous Advantage Actor‑Critic. The architecture is illustrated in the following diagram: