In plain words: A free toolkit gives reinforcement learning researchers a shared set of practice problems, like games and robot tasks, all using the same simple controls, plus a website for posting scores. This lets anyone test and compare learning algorithms instead of each lab using its setup.

Abstract · OpenAI Gym

OpenAI Gym is a toolkit for reinforcement learning research. It includes a growing collection of benchmark problems that expose a common interface, and a website where people can share their results and compare the performance of algorithms. This whitepaper discusses the components of OpenAI Gym and the design decisions that went into the software.

Greg Brockman, Vicki Cheung, Ludwig Pettersson, Jonas Schneider, John Schulman, Jie Tang, Wojciech Zaremba
arXiv:1606.01540 · cs.LG, cs.AI · submitted Jun 5, 2016
abstract · pdf · html