OpenAI gym

We need a playground before we can teach anything. OpenAI Gym is that playground for artificial intelligence (AI). She lets us run toy experiments without the pain of wiring up the real world.

Environments

Think of environments as tiny worlds. Each one has its own rules, like the grid of FrozenLake or the pong paddle in Atari. The AI sees an observation, tries an action, and the world pushes back with a reward. That’s it. We reset the world when she falls off the edge, so she can try again.

Training loops

We wrap these worlds in a loop. Observe, act, reward, repeat. It’s dull to write, but that’s the point: the loop forces her to stumble through thousands of tries. We watch to see if the rewards inch upward. When they don’t, we tweak the loop. Or we just let her grind until something clicks.

Why toy agents

Real robots break when we teach badly. Toy agents don’t. They’re cheap mistakes. The paddle moves wrong? Reset. She gets stuck? Reset. We can fail safely until we see her improve. That’s how we learn too.

Our part

Our job is to write code that’s small enough to run, but not so small it hides the lesson. A loop, an environment, some patience. If we can train a stick figure to walk, we’re on our way.

Musing

We keep waiting for her to surprise us, but mostly she just reminds us how patient we aren’t.