A group headed by Elon Musk has opened a kind of gym for robots, called OpenAI Gym. Mr Musk is the boss of the electric car company Tesla Motors and the space travel company, SpaceX. He also founded the online payments website PayPal. His latest project is an open platform for code writers to test their latest work. People are free to test their ideas for artificial intelligence (A.I.) on it. Researchers can test and share their algorithms for A.I. Algorithms are special sets of rules in a computer program that can solve problems and deal with lots of information.
Mr Musk wrote about why his team decided to make the OpenAI Gym free. He said: "Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, [without the] need to generate [money]." The OpenAI Gym follows the idea of giving rewards for learning – like giving a dog a treat when it learns something new. If an algorithm does well in the gym, it gets a reward. If it fails, it gets no reward. The aim of the gym is to develop an algorithm that can multi-task; to do many things at the same time, rather than just one thing.
