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env_semantics.rst

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Environment semantics

Real-time environments

Universe environments differ from other Gym environments in that the environment keeps running in real-time, even when the agent does not call step. This has a few important implications:

  • Actions and observations can no longer be considered to occur on a "clock tick".
  • An explicit call to reset is asynchronous and returns immediately, even though the environment has not yet finished resetting. (If you would prefer the reset call to block until the reset has finished, you can wrap the client-side environment with a BlockingReset wrapper)
  • Since the environment will not have waited to finish connecting to the VNC server before returning, the initial return values from reset will be None to indicate that there is not yet a valid observation.
  • An agent that successfully learns from a Universe environment cannot take "thinking breaks": it must keep sending actions to the environment at all times.
  • Lag and latency play a major role in your agent's ability to successfully learn in a given environment. The latency and profiling numbers returned in the info dictionary can provide important information for training.

Vectorized API

The vectorized Gym API allows a single client-side environment to control a vector of remotes. The main difference with the non-vectorized Gym API is that individual environments will automatically reset upon reaching the end of an episode. (An episode is defined as ending when an agent has concretely succeeded or failed at the task, such as after clearing a level of a game, or losing the game. Some environments without clearly delineated success and failure conditions may not have episodes.)

There are two API methods, reset and step. The semantics are:

  • reset takes no arguments and returns a vector of observations:
observation_n = env.reset()
  • step consumes a vector of actions, and returns a vector of observations, vector of rewards, vector of done booleans, and an info dictionary. The info dictionary has an n key, which contains a vector of infos specific to each env:
observation_n, reward_n, done_n, info = env.step(action_n)
# len(info['n']) == len(observation_n)

Some important notes:

  • At any given moment, some of the environments may be resetting. Resetting environments will have a None value for their observation. For example, an observation_n of [None, {'vision': ...}, {'vision': ...}] indicates that the environment at index 0 is resetting.
  • When an index returns done=True, the corresponding environment will automatically start resetting.
  • The user must call reset once before calling step; undefined behavior will result if reset is not called. Further reset calls are allowed, but generally are used only if the environment has been idle for a while (such as with periodic evaluation), or when it is important to start at the beginning

Versioning

The remote is versioned and has fixed semantics, assuming sufficient compute resources are applied (i.e. if you don't have enough CPU, your flash environments will likely behave differently). The client's exact semantics will depend on the version of universe you have installed, and you should track the version of that together with the rest of your agent code.