better support for custom environments

[intellabs]

better support for custom environments

[itaicaspi-intel]

Thanks Zach, I think that this is a good suggestion.
Maybe something along the lines of Gym's register environment?
To allow using Coach within other scripts, it would probably also be good to have a better python interface to Coach, such as the one you cited from rllab.

[jtoy]

agree, would love this. I wanted to try using this with https://github.com/jtoy/sensenet as its openai compatible, but there were too many files to modify.

[zach-nervana]

I added a new method for specifying which environment to use in the case that the environment follows the interface provided by openai gym. In a preset, you can now specify the environment via: env.level = 'package.module:ClassName'. This means that new environments and be integrated more easily. The only place where coach needs modified to work with new environments now is presets.py. This change was completed in #41.

I will leave this issue open because it would still be nice to configure coach without modifying presets.py. Also, this fix is only helpful in the case that your environment is a gym environment.

[jtoy]

@zach-nervana Great, I'll test it out and let you know.

[saddy001]

@zach-nervana could you update the docs (https://nervanasystems.github.io/coach/contributing/add_env/index.html) to reflect your change?

Thanks,

[itaicaspi-intel]

thanks @saddy001, it is now updated in https://nervanasystems.github.io/coach/contributing/add_env/index.html as you suggested.
the environment integration process was simplified as well, and we also have a step by step tutorial notebook to accompany the documentation (https://github.com/NervanaSystems/coach/blob/master/tutorials/2.%20Adding%20an%20Environment.ipynb)