The firm says it launched this is because progress made in reinforcement learning lags for a few reasons. Firstly, OpenAI notes that existing, open-source testing environments lack diversity and are difficult to set up and use. What's more, there's a dearth of standardization, which makes reproducing the tests -- key for any sort of academic research -- between different projects in an apples to apples way pretty hard to do.

Want in? The Python-based environments apparently are compatible with algorithms written in "any framework," including Tensorflow and Theano. But if you're looking to dominate the leaderboards you might be disappointed: OpenAI says it's worried less about your high scores and would rather see the generality of your technique when you upload your results.