Table of Contents
What is Gym and its core concepts
How to install and use Gym
Frequently Asked Questions and Notes
How to learn further
Home Backend Development Python Tutorial Introduction to Reinforcement Learning with Python Gym

Introduction to Reinforcement Learning with Python Gym

Jul 30, 2025 am 03:50 AM

Gym is a reinforcement learning environment library provided by OpenAI, and its core function is to provide standard environment interfaces. Its core concepts include environments (such as CartPole), reset(), step(action), render(), action_space, and observation_space. The installation command is pip install gym. If you need Atari game, you need to add pip install gym[atari]. The usage process includes creating an environment, initializing the state, looping out actions and updating the state. Notes include version compatibility, rendering mode selection and environment shutdown. It is recommended that beginners start with a simple environment and combine it with frameworks such as Stable Baselines3 to learn more.

Introduction to Reinforcement Learning with Python Gym

If you are new to reinforcement learning and want to practice it in Python, then Gym is definitely a tool you can't avoid. It is an open source library developed by OpenAI, specially used to test and develop reinforcement learning algorithms. Simply put, it provides a standard set of environmental interfaces, allowing you to focus on the algorithm itself rather than the details of environment construction.

Introduction to Reinforcement Learning with Python Gym

What is Gym and its core concepts

The core of Gym is "Environment", such as the classic CartPole, MountainCar, Atari games, etc. Each environment has several basic components:

  • reset() : reset the environment and return to the initial state
  • step(action) : execute an action to return the next status, reward, whether to end, etc.
  • render() : Visualize the current environment state
  • action_space and observation_space : tell you the structure of actions and states

You can understand it as a game engine, you control the player (Agent), and Gym provides game scenes and rules.

Introduction to Reinforcement Learning with Python Gym

How to install and use Gym

Installation is very simple, only one line of command is required:

 pip install gym

If you want to play Atari games, you need additional installation:

Introduction to Reinforcement Learning with Python Gym
 pip install gym[atari]

It's also very intuitive to use. Taking the CartPole environment as an example, the basic process is as follows:

 import gym

env = gym.make('CartPole-v1') # Create environment observation = env.reset() # Initialize state for _ in range(1000):
    env.render() # Display screen action = env.action_space.sample() # Randomly select action observation, reward, done, info = env.step(action) # Execute action if done:
        observation = env.reset()

env.close()

This code demonstrates how to run a random policy Agent. Although no learning algorithm is used, this is the starting point for all reinforcement learning projects.


Frequently Asked Questions and Notes

When using Gym, there are several places that are easy to get stuck in the pit:

  • Version problem : Gym has made a lot of structural adjustments after v0.26, and some old codes may be incompatible. If you have strange problems, check the version first.
  • Rendering issues : Rendering errors may occur in some environments, especially in remote servers or Jupyter Notebooks. You can try to use mode='rgb_array' to get image data.
  • Environment Close : Remember to call env.close() at the end, otherwise it may get stuck or occupy resources.

If you are a beginner, it is recommended to start with simple environments such as CartPole or LunarLander, first run the process, and then gradually try more complex tasks.


How to learn further

Gym itself does not provide reinforcement learning algorithms, but it cooperates well with many RL frameworks, such as Stable Baselines3, RLlib, etc. You can first use Gym to familiarize yourself with the environment interaction method, and then combine these libraries to achieve training.

In addition, Gym's official documentation and sample code are well written, so you can read it more when encountering problems. There are also many Gym-based introductory projects on GitHub, and it will be helpful to practice your hands.


Basically that's it. Gym is not complicated to use, but many details are easily overlooked, especially in terms of version and environment configuration. Try it a few more times, and after getting familiar with it, it will be a good helper for you to learn and experiment with RL algorithms.

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