environments

Definition

The world an agent acts in: it accepts actions and returns observations and rewards. Games and physics simulators were the classic examples; today a shell, a browser, or a codebase serves the same role. Because what an agent can learn is bounded by what the environment lets it try and rewards it for, building good environments is often the substantive contribution of a paper.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough: Terminal-Universe — Turning Agent Logs Back Into Reusable Execution EnvironmentsTerminal-Universe: Turning Agent Trajectories into Scalable Terminal Environments
• Paper Explained: StarHarness — Evolving the Scaffold Instead of the WeightsStarHarness: Evolving Harnesses with Stratified Search for Enterprise Environments