Train a warehouse robot by trial and error. You never tell it where to go: you only choose what is rewarded and what is penalised. Then watch what it learned, and see what the company earns.
A company uses a robot to carry parcels from the dock to two customers. Nobody programs the route. The robot must learn it.
Everything is on one floor: the dock, the shelves, the scanner and both customers. The stairs are an opening in the floor that leads down to the basement. The robot never needs them. If it rolls onto them, it falls and breaks.
This is the view you will see in the next steps. One square is one move.
A working shift is 200 moves. After a delivery the robot goes back to the dock for the next parcel. A broken robot is repaired at the dock, which costs 10 moves. The floor is slippery: about 1 move in 10 slides sideways.
It learns by trial and error: it tries actions, sees the reward, and over many rounds prefers the actions that bring the most reward.
This is your only way to tell the robot what you want. The robot will do what is rewarded, which is not always what you meant. Changing a setting starts a new, untrained robot.
One round: the robot starts at the dock and acts until it delivers a parcel, breaks, or has made 60 moves. At first it moves at random. You can watch it try: the first rounds are shown slowly, the later ones faster. Each robot has a training budget of 5,000 rounds.
Learning is now switched off. The robot works one shift of 200 moves and only uses what it has learned. Nothing here counts for the final game.
Your robot works five shifts with learning switched off. The five shifts are the same for everyone, so the same robot always gets the same score. Your score is the profit of the company, not the reward the robot collected.
Every final game you play is logged here, so you can compare your robots. The log disappears when you close or reload the page.
Method: tabular Q-learning, a basic reinforcement learning method. Everything runs in this browser; nothing is sent anywhere. The warehouse and its numbers are invented for teaching.