01. Introduction

Introduction

For this coding exercise, you will use OpenAI Gym's Taxi-v2 environment to design an algorithm to teach a taxi agent to navigate a small gridworld. The goal is to adapt all that you've learned in the previous lessons to solve a new environment!

Before proceeding, read the description of the environment in subsection 3.1 of this paper.

You can verify that the description in the paper matches the OpenAI Gym environment by peeking at the code here.

Answer the quiz questions below to check your understanding of the environment.

Question 1

How large is the state space?
SOLUTION: There are 500 possible states, corresponding to 25 possible grid locations, 5 locations for the passenger, and 4 destinations.

How many actions are available to the agent?
SOLUTION:
  • There are 6 possible actions, corresponding to moving North, East, South, or West, picking up the passenger, and dropping off the passenger.