The OpenAI project, the nonprofit organization opened at the end of 2015 with the goal of developing artificial intelligence for the good of all humanity, released the public beta of OpenAI Gym, a sort of virtual gym for this type software. Developers can go on GitHub, the hosting service specializing in free software, and download the toolkit to test the artificial intelligence they created.

In the Gym development, the project focused on the reinforcement learning (RL) technique, which aims to create systems capable of adapting to environmental mutations using rewards. Initially, the idea was to use this virtual gym for help the project’s internal RL algorithm developments but the hope is to help the whole community of artificial intelligence developers.

The OpenAI project chose to release anything that produces as free / open source software therefore the Gym toolkit is available to everybody as well. It’s compatible with algorithms written using other frameworks such as Theano and TensorFlow, the heart of the artificial intelligence created by Google. These two software are available under free licenses as well.

The OpenAI Gym development was decided to address two problems that are slowing down the development of RL algorithms. So far there were difficulties in making reliable tests and this virtual gym aims to create a better environment for their use. From the beginning of the project there was also the desire to establish standards that allow for comparisons and assessments as objective as possible.

OpenAI Gym offers different environments for tests with different degrees of difficulty and many different types of data. In addition to various types of simulation such as those of robots there are several video games such as Go and classic Atari games. The initial offering will be expanded over time and contributions from the community are welcome.

The tests give scores but the result that really matters is that the developed technique’s generalily because specialization has limited usefulness in the eyes of OpenAI project. The effort is towards a job that involves the community of developers to get results useful to everybody.

This is only a beta version of OpenAI Gym, the initial phase of a job that will continue over time within a larger project. OpenAI was launched with about $1 billion in funding but a lot of money is not enough to generate immediate progress. However, it makes sure that the project is supported in the long term.