Hearts Gym: Learning Reinforcement Learning as a Team Event

TL;DR

This paper describes a team-based reinforcement learning course centered around Hearts Gym, an RL environment for the card game Hearts, emphasizing hands-on learning and competitive agent training.

Contribution

It introduces Hearts Gym as an accessible RL tutorial environment and demonstrates an effective team-based teaching approach during the pandemic.

Findings

Participants successfully trained RL agents for Hearts Gym.

The course fostered engagement through team competitions.

Hands-on RL training improved understanding of key concepts.

Abstract

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors of this paper organized a Reinforcement Learning (RL) course for a graduate school in the field of data science. We describe the strategy and materials for creating an exciting learning experience despite the ubiquitous Zoom fatigue and evaluate the course qualitatively. The key organizational features are a focus on a competitive hands-on setting in teams, supported by a minimum of lectures providing the essential background on RL. The practical part of the course revolved around Hearts Gym, an RL environment for the card game Hearts that we developed as an entry-level tutorial to RL. Participants were tasked with training agents to explore reward shaping and other RL hyperparameters. For a final evaluation, the agents of the participants competed against each other.