JOIN ME for the NeurIPS 2020 Flatland Multi-Agent RL Challenge!
deep learning machine learning arxiv explained neural networks ai artificial intelligence paper
Join me to solve the NeurIPS 2020 challenge on multi-agent reinforcement learning in the flatland environment. This challenge has participants optimize a complex train scheduling system, subject to accidents, delays and re-routing. The plan is to solve this as a community with no expectations of winning and fully in the open.

Discord: https://discord.gg/4H8xxDF 
Community GitHub Repo: https://github.com/yk/youtube-flatland
Neurips 2020 Flatland Challenge: https://www.aicrowd.com/challenges/neurips-2020-flatland-challenge
Flatland Environment: https://gitlab.aicrowd.com/flatland/flatland

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Intro
1:00 - The Flatland Environment
2:00 - The NeurIPS 2020 Flatland Challenge
3:20 - Let's do this as a Community
4:10 - Ground Rules
6:15 - Conclusion

Links:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/yannickilcher
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ykilcher
Discord: https://discord.gg/4H8xxDF
BitChute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/yannic-kilcher
Minds: https://www.minds.com/ykilcher
 Hi there, today I want to talk to you about something that's very near and dear to my heart and that is the Flatland environment. Now the Flatland environment is a train simulator that has been developed by the Swiss Train Company and I ride the trains every day. So when I heard that there is a NeurIPS challenge to use the Flatland environment to make the train system in my country better, I of course was very excited to do that. So out of purely egotistical reasons I'm going to present to you the Flatland environment and I invite you to join me in solving this as a group together. So the plan is basically that we as a community sort of do this challenge and completely in the open with absolutely no aspirations of winning or doing well or getting any of the prizes just for the fun of it and we'll see how far we'll come together. Okay so let me demonstrate the environment itself. So as you can see here this is a visualization of the environments. There are these agents in the environments and they have to reach certain goals and of course they can't crash. If you look here to the left there's a bunch of them crashing right now which is not good and your task is this is a multi-agent reinforcement learning problem. All of these agents have to reach their goal and as fast as possible without any collisions along these tracks right here. So you basically have to specify for every single agent what their next action at each time step is. Now this simulator is completely given to you. You can use it and basically it's a planning problem for multiple agents. So at each step you have to decide does the agent move up, down, left or right depending on whether they can do so, depending on the tracks and whether something is in their way or is not in their way. And you know every agent should reach their goal at the closest possible or at the shortest possible time of course. Now there is this NURIPS 2020 Flatland challenge and basically you can submit your solutions to their evaluator and there's a leaderboard and everything and I thought it would be fun to participate in this. Now I don't exactly know what's the exact connection to NURIPS and so on but I don't care honestly and this hasn't started yet. The timeline isn't really open yet but it will start soon but I think we can already start working on it. So the plan here is basically to just you know kind of I have no idea of traffic scheduling. No idea, absolutely clue less. But I know a lot about reinforcement learning and even though they say the challenge has already existed last year in a very in a slightly different form. I think it was just one agent instead of multi-agent and they said usually you have to combine the reinforcement learning with like some traditional stuff in order to perform really well. Like screw that. No I'm totally up for that but it would be fun to just blast it off with RL and go there. So here's my proposition. I have opened a discord server for you to join where you can join in and basically people can discuss solutions to this problem. I'll make a github repository in public where people can submit poll requests to and I'll be sort of the merger and whatnot of these. And we together sort of develop solutions. Now my idea is that people would sort of independently try things and then kind of suggest things and if they work we can merge them and whatnot. And there's just a lot of discussion in the discord server. I myself will not be like super active on the server. It's meant for the community basically together to discuss things and whoever wants to do that. So I just want to make some things clear from the beginning. I will be the dictator of this project. The 100% authoritarian no compromises dictator. If anything is supposed to be decided I may elect to hold the vote and I may not. If we win something I'll decide what to do with it. So just this because otherwise there's just trouble right. Are we going to win? Probably not because anyone could just come to our github repo clone it and then tune it a little bit more. Right so I have no aspirations of winning right here. Also as I already said I'm not going to be super active in this discord. It's meant as a method for the community among itself to communicate. Third if you decide to put in work don't expect others to do so. Expect nothing. If the project doesn't work out we scrap it. If people get tired of it we scrap it. If there's some other problem we scrap it. No expectations. Never get mad at anyone else for not doing as much work or anything like this. This is purely you participate because you yourself want to learn something, want to have fun and if someone else does the same thing that's all the better okay. I will have a mainly supervisory role in this in that I will look at things that are happening and advise and occasionally I of course will participate myself. So I hope the framing of this is clear. This is not me throwing a hundred percent at this. I just thought it would be cool to do something as a community together and this challenge it seems like you know there are other challenges like mine RL where everyone needs like a billion GPUs to even get competitive. This seems like small enough that we could actually make a difference here and hopefully do something very cool. All right if you still want to participate even though I really really really try to talk you out of this right now I will leave a link to the discord somewhere in the description and a link to the git repo as well and I hope that some of you will be motivated enough to come join and have some fun. All right I'll see you there bye bye.
 Hi there, today I want to talk to you about something that's very near and dear to my heart
 and that is the Flatland environment. Now the Flatland environment is a train simulator that
 has been developed by the Swiss Train Company and I ride the trains every day. So when I heard that
 there is a NeurIPS challenge to use the Flatland environment to make the train system in my country
 better, I of course was very excited to do that. So out of purely egotistical reasons I'm going to
 present to you the Flatland environment and I invite you to join me in solving this as a group
 together. So the plan is basically that we as a community sort of do this challenge and completely
 in the open with absolutely no aspirations of winning or doing well or getting any of the
 prizes just for the fun of it and we'll see how far we'll come together. Okay so let me demonstrate
 the environment itself. So as you can see here this is a visualization of the environments. There
 are these agents in the environments and they have to reach certain goals and of course they
 can't crash. If you look here to the left there's a bunch of them crashing right now which is not
 good and your task is this is a multi-agent reinforcement learning problem. All of these
 agents have to reach their goal and as fast as possible without any collisions along these tracks
 right here. So you basically have to specify for every single agent what their next action at each
 time step is. Now this simulator is completely given to you. You can use it and basically it's
 a planning problem for multiple agents. So at each step you have to decide does the agent move up,
 down, left or right depending on whether they can do so, depending on the tracks and whether something
 is in their way or is not in their way. And you know every agent should reach their goal at the
 closest possible or at the shortest possible time of course. Now there is this NURIPS 2020
 Flatland challenge and basically you can submit your solutions to their evaluator and there's a
 leaderboard and everything and I thought it would be fun to participate in this. Now I don't exactly
 know what's the exact connection to NURIPS and so on but I don't care honestly and this hasn't
 started yet. The timeline isn't really open yet but it will start soon but I think we can already
 start working on it. So the plan here is basically to just you know kind of I have no idea of traffic
 scheduling. No idea, absolutely clue less. But I know a lot about reinforcement learning and even
 though they say the challenge has already existed last year in a very in a slightly different form.
 I think it was just one agent instead of multi-agent and they said usually you have to combine the
 reinforcement learning with like some traditional stuff in order to perform really well. Like screw
 that. No I'm totally up for that but it would be fun to just blast it off with RL and go there.
 So here's my proposition. I have opened a discord server for you to join where you can join in and
 basically people can discuss solutions to this problem. I'll make a github repository in public
 where people can submit poll requests to and I'll be sort of the merger and whatnot of these. And
 we together sort of develop solutions. Now my idea is that people would sort of independently
 try things and then kind of suggest things and if they work we can merge them and whatnot. And
 there's just a lot of discussion in the discord server. I myself will not be like super active on
 the server. It's meant for the community basically together to discuss things and whoever wants to do
 that. So I just want to make some things clear from the beginning. I will be the dictator of this
 project. The 100% authoritarian no compromises dictator. If anything is supposed to be decided
 I may elect to hold the vote and I may not. If we win something I'll decide what to do with it.
 So just this because otherwise there's just trouble right. Are we going to win? Probably
 not because anyone could just come to our github repo clone it and then tune it a little bit more.
 Right so I have no aspirations of winning right here. Also as I already said I'm not going to be
 super active in this discord. It's meant as a method for the community among itself to
 communicate. Third if you decide to put in work don't expect others to do so. Expect nothing. If
 the project doesn't work out we scrap it. If people get tired of it we scrap it. If there's some other
 problem we scrap it. No expectations. Never get mad at anyone else for not doing as much work or
 anything like this. This is purely you participate because you yourself want to learn something,
 want to have fun and if someone else does the same thing that's all the better okay. I will have a
 mainly supervisory role in this in that I will look at things that are happening and advise and
 occasionally I of course will participate myself. So I hope the framing of this is clear. This is
 not me throwing a hundred percent at this. I just thought it would be cool to do something as a
 community together and this challenge it seems like you know there are other challenges like
 mine RL where everyone needs like a billion GPUs to even get competitive. This seems like small
 enough that we could actually make a difference here and hopefully do something very cool.
 All right if you still want to participate even though I really really really try to talk you out
 of this right now I will leave a link to the discord somewhere in the description and a link
 to the git repo as well and I hope that some of you will be motivated enough to come join and have
 some fun. All right I'll see you there bye bye.