A proposed standard interface for RL software

[Rich Sutton]

To Reinforcement Learning Researchers:

We are sending this note to announce a proposed standard interface for
reinforcement learning research software.  The objectives of this first
step towards standardization are fairly modest.  The standard covers only
the top-level interface between the RL agent and its environment.  The idea
is that you might program an agent and I might program an environment, and
as long as we both follow the standard interface it should be trivial to
connect them to each other.  This should make it easier for people to swap
interconnect novel agents and environments.  In the long run, we hope that
this will lead to a library of RL environments and agents that can be used
as testbeds for RL research of all kinds.

We have completed standard interfaces for C++ and CommonLisp.
Documentation, interface code, and several examples are complete and
available via the web, starting at
http://www-anw.cs.umass.edu/People/sutton/RLinterface/RLinterface.html.
Feedback and further contributions encouraged.

Rich Sutton                                                 rich at cs.umass.edu
Juan Carlos Santamaria                                   carlos at cc.gatech.edu