Ml-agents: please get rid of tensorflow 1.7 dependency

[clankill3r]

With pip3 I get:
Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement tensorflow==1.7 (from versions: 1.13.0rc1, 1.13.0rc2, 1.13.1, 2.0.0a0)

This repository is still such a pain to get the work.

[MarcoMeter]

Sounds like your are not using Python version 3.6

[harperj]

Hi @clankill3r -- I think MarcoMeter is right, at this time you'll need to use Python 3.6 to use ML-Agents. We did look into updating the version of Python / Tensorflow recently and discovered bugs and package version conflicts which haven't yet been resolved.

[clankill3r]

It was with 3.6.
I figured out that it works using pip install "tensorflow==1.7.0" instead of pip3.
(Using pip instead of pip3 seems to work quite often in general).

We try to get ml-agents working with a small group of students, for most students it works now.
Next school semester ml-agents might be a candidate for a assignment with the students but dependency hell is a big influencer for now.

Atm we do it using the following steps, (we moved from pip to miniconda where possible).

1. install miniconda https://docs.conda.io/en/latest/miniconda.html
2. conda install python=3.6
3. conda create -n py36 python=3.6
4. source activate py36 (Do this everytime you open the terminal)
5. pip install "tensorflow==1.7.0"
6. conda install -c anaconda jupyter
7. pip install mlagents

navigate to the directory where you want the unity project installed:

git clone https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ml-agents
cd ml-agents
cd ml-agents-envs
pip install -e ./
cd ..
cd ml-agents
pip install -e ./

As for now, it fails when for example someone had a version of pillow installed before.

It would be really great if the dependencies where just included in the repository in such a way that no additional installations are required.

Also, what is the reason of setup.py? Is it supposed to install dependencies or check for dependencies being installed?

        'mlagents_envs==0.8.1',
        'tensorflow>=1.7,<1.8',
        'Pillow>=4.2.1',
        'matplotlib',
        'numpy>=1.13.3,<=1.14.5',
        'jupyter',
        'pytest>=3.2.2,<4.0.0',
        'docopt',
        'pyyaml',
        'protobuf>=3.6,<3.7',
        'grpcio>=1.11.0,<1.12.0',
        'pypiwin32==223;platform_system=="Windows"'],

Eventually we hope to get a list of commands that just work 99% of the cases.

[unityjeffrey]

hi @clankill3r - yes, setup.py is intended to check and install the dependencies. let us know if you or your students continue to have issues. closing out the ticket for now, but feel free to re-open if needed.

[simonbogh]

Trying to understand what is happening here, because I am experiencing the same.

Clean virtenv with python 3.6.7. I run the following.
pip install mlagents==0.9.3
It will install tensorflow 1.7.1

Hereafter I can install tensorflow 1.12.3 if I want to without any problems.

If I install tensorflow 1.12.x first, and then mlagents, then it will downgrade tensorflow to 1.7.1.

[chriselion]

Hi @simonbogh ,
I think that's just a quirk of how pip handles things. In my experience, sometime mlagents-learn will complain about the versions when you run it, even if you managed to make pip happy.

The good news is that the latest development version of ml-agents relaxes the restrictions on tensorflow (and numpy and python) versions. We're releasing v0.10 this week, which will contain these changes.

[simonbogh]

Hi @chriselion ,

I am happy to hear that, because it is quite annoying to get your TF package downgraded when installing mlagents. When you say relaxes the restrictions on TF, is it still for a specific version or just any version?

[clankill3r]

@chriselion That is really great to hear.
Now we might be actually able to use this with students.

[chriselion]

@simonbogh
We currently require tensorflow>=1.7,<2.0
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ml-agents/blob/master/ml-agents/setup.py#L43

We're working on supporting tensorflow 2.0.0 now that it's available.

[simonbogh]

@chriselion
And if you install from pip packages which I did? Here it downgraded my TF to 1.7.1 from 1.12.x.

[simonbogh]

Ok I see, that requirement was changed in 0.10.0, 3 days ago? For 0.9.3 it says
dist=tensorflow<1.8,>=1.7 parent=mlagents==0.9.3

[chriselion]

Yeah, sorry, it was changed on the develop branch a few weeks ago, but the first published package that has the change is 0.10.0.