atari-py dependency doesn't seem maintained

[rossbar]

The reinforcement learning tutorial depends on atari-py which doesn't seem to be actively maintained (last commit Aug 2019). The README indicates that it's in "maintenance mode" but there haven't been any active developments and the wheels are out of date. This latter necessitates that wheels be built locally, requiring cmake.

I'm not familiar with gym or atari-py so I don't know if there are any newer packages or viable alternatives. Does anyone know of any viable alternatives?

[melissawm]

Installing gym[atari] from pip was enough for me, but maybe this has changed. @8bitmp3 any ideas?

[rossbar]

It will work if you have cmake and one of ffmpeg/avconv installed on your system (at least on *nix platforms). The wheel is being built locally though (at least for Python >= 3.8, I haven't tested with older versions).

[8bitmp3]

Thanks for bringing this up @rossbar. Is this about config.yaml?:

version: 2
jobs:
  build-docs:
    working_directory: ~/repo
    docker:
      - image: circleci/python:3.8.5-buster
    steps:
      - checkout

      - run:
          name: Install deps for building atari-py
          command: sudo apt-get install -y cmake ffmpeg
...

As @melissawm, gym[atari] should be enough to run the Atari simulation (pip install gym[atari] (https://github.com/openai/gym, last commit as of today was on Feb 16, 2021)). In the tutorial, we state that the user needs to install jupyter-book and gym[atari], so hopefully that's enough for them to try it out.

[rossbar]

pip install gym[atari] is just a convenient shorthand for installing both gym and atari-py (the requirements file is already set up this way), the latter being the problem. pip install gym[atari] will still result in the the atari-py wheel being built locally.

[8bitmp3]

@rossbar Good point. Let's hope the OpenAI team will fix gym[atari] if atari-pi starts breaking 🤔 A lot of reinforcement learning research is probably still being carried out on Atari 2600.

[rossbar]

See also #72

[rossbar]

The atari-py project is publishing wheels again, though there are new issues as noted in #87. Closing this for now to switch focus to the more relevant issue.