Simple Setup of OpenAI Gym on MacOS
OpenAI Gym is a toolkit for testing reinforcement learning algorithms. Gym is fun and powerful, but installation can be a challenge. This post will give you a one-line command to install Gym on any modern Mac, reducing your setup time to minutes.
To get started, open up terminal and run the below command to download and run the setup script:
bash <(curl -Ls https://raw.githubusercontent.com/andrewschreiber/scripts/master/gym_installer.sh)
That’s it! The script will take a few minutes to interactively install Gym and it’s dependencies as seen below.
How It Works
[Step 1] Homebrew — MacOS Package manager
We use Homebrew to install Gym’s system-level dependencies. Homebrew downloads packages to their own folders, and uses symlinks to make the commands available. Here’s a summary of each dependency:
cmake: Cross-platform build tool.
swig: Call C/C++ interfaces from Python.
boost: Powerful additions to C++ standard library
boost-python: Python wrapper for boost.
sdl2: Provides low-level, cross-platform access to graphics hardware
wget: Easily download files
We also install the Xcode Command Line tools, which is needed for compiling certain environments.
[Step 2] Conda — Environment and package manager
Conda (also known by Anaconda or Miniconda) is an alternative to the pip/virtualenv/easy_install toolchain. Conda makes it easy to setup Python 3.5 and by using a Conda environment existing python setups will not be affected.
[Step 3] Install OpenAI Gym
We install Gym using pip within our Conda environment called ‘p36’. Here are the library dependencies:
numpy: Scientific computing
request: HTTP requests
six: Python 2 & 3 compatibility
pyglet: Windowing and graphics
keras: High-level neural network API
theano: Deep Learning & matrix math integrated with numpy
atari_py: High-performance hooks into emulated games
Pillow: Image processing
PyOpenGL: Call OpenGL APIs with Python
box2d-py: 2D game physics simulator
pachi-py: Play Go programmatically
mujoco_py: Qwop-like physics simulations
imageio: Image reading/writing
[Step 4] Test an agent.
We create a ‘GymAgents’ folder in the current directory to place our Python-based agents.
Then we download and run a simple example agent to make sure Gym has been successfully installed. If everything works, you will see a ASCII message like this:
If you run into any challenges with the setup script, let me know via the comment section or preferably Github issues. My goal is to make the script as fast, clear, and enjoyable as possible.
You now should be setup with OpenAI Gym. Read the docs and test your Reinforcement Learning algorithms!
