Greetings! Welcome to the first chapter of this book. This book will introduce you to the awesome OpenAI Gym learning environment and guide you through an exciting journey to get you equipped with enough skills to train state-of-the-art, artificial intelligence agent-based systems. This book will help you develop hands-on experience with reinforcement learning and deep reinforcement learning through practical projects ranging from developing an autonomous, self-driving car to developing Atari game-playing agents that can surpass human performance. By the time you complete the book, you will be in a position to explore the endless possibilities of using artificial intelligence to solve algorithmic tasks, play games, and fix control problems.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- Understanding intelligent agents and learning environments
- Understanding what OpenAI Gym is all about
- Different categories of tasks/environments that are available, with a brief description of what each category is suitable for
- Understanding the key features of OpenAI Gym
- Getting an idea about what you can do with the OpenAI Gym toolkit
- Creating and visualizing your first Gym environment
Let's start our journey by understanding what an intelligent agent is.
