RL-Glue 3.0 Release Candidate 1 is now available (your help requested)
Brian Tanner
Learning and Artificial Intelligence group at the University of
Alberta is proud to announce the first public test release of the new
and improved RL-Glue Version 3.0!
This release has made it through internal beta testing and has the
designation Release Candidate 1 (RC1).
In this e-mail
-----------------------------------------
1 :: What Is RL-Glue?
2 :: What's New in RL-Glue 3.0?
3 :: How to get it?
4 :: What we want from you!
5 :: Upcoming Submissions!
5.1 :: MLOSS Workshop at NIPS
5.2 :: MLOSS Journal Article
5.3 :: RL-Competition 2009
1 :: What Is RL-Glue?
---------------------------------
If you don't know what RL-Glue is, it is a protocol and associate
software libraries allowing reinforcement learning agents,
environments, and experiments written by different people in different
languages to work together. RL-Glue has been the base for the last
few reinforcement learning competitions, and that trend will continue
with the 2009 Reinforcement Learning Competition.
2 :: What's New in RL-Glue 3.0?
-------------------------------
- A new homepage: http://glue.rl-community.org/
- Revamped build system (autotools) for maximum cross-platform install
compatibilty (Linux, Unix, MacOS, Cygwin)
-Installing has never been simpler:
>$ ./configure
>$ make
>$ sudo make install
- RL-Glue now installs to /usr/local
- Headers and libs in standard search paths
- Compiling agents/environments/experiments has never been easier:
>$ gcc MyAgent.c -lrlagent -o myAgent.exe
- Codecs for C/C++, Java, Python, MATLAB AND LISP <--- MATLAB AND LISP!
- charArray (String) observation and action types!
- NEW Documentation
- General RL-Glue Overview
- RL-Glue Technical Manual
- Different manual for each codec!
3 :: How to get it
-----------------------------
The best thing is to check out the new homepage:
http://glue.rl-community.org/
This page explains the RL-Glue and RL-Glue-Extensions projects and has
links to DOWNLOADS and DOCUMENTATION!
4 :: What we want from you!
-------------------------------
If you could download this software and try it out, we would really
appreciate it. We're looking for everything from typos in the docs,
compile problems, to high level
structural issues in the design. This is a good opportunity to
complain about what is wrong with RL-Glue!
We especially want feedback about the documentation, installation, and
explanation of the different projects, and how they relate. Also, of
how easy it is to use. Does it do what you want?
Ok... so we want everything. Please let us know what you really think!
Please direct your feedback to the rl-glue Google group:
rl-...@googlegroups.com
http://googlegroups.com/group/rl-glue
5 :: Upcoming Submissions!
-----------------------------------------
There are venues in the near future that we hope to use to publicize
RL-Glue. Some of the deadlines are very soon, which is why we need
your help!
5.1 :: MLOSS Workshop at NIPS (http://mloss.org/workshop/nips08/)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We plan on submitting RL-Glue to the NIPS Workshop on Machine Learning
Open Source Software 2008
The deadline is Monday, October 6th. Any feedback we can use to make
RL-Glue easier to understand or use by then will strengthen our
submission.
5.2 :: MLOSS Journal Article (http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/mloss/)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After we've shaken the documentation and examples out a bit, we will
be submitting RL-Glue to the MLOSS special track of JMLR. This is a
very big deal to
us and represents the culmination of years of our efforts. Obviously
we want to make RL-Glue as absolutely good as possible for this
submission!
5.3 :: RL-Competition 2009
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RL-Glue 3.0 will be the basis for the 2009 RL-Competition Software.
The sooner we get any issue shaken out, the sooner the competition can
start rolling!
Thanks everyone!
Brian Tanner br...@tannerpages.com
Adam White awh...@cs.ualberta.ca
Richard Sutton ri...@richsutton.com