Introducing ELF: An extensive, lightweight and flexible platform for game research

Introduced ELF (Extensive, Lightweight, and Flexible) platform for game research to democratize AI research. ELF allows researchers to test algorithms in various game environments (board games, Atari, custom RTS games) with reduced computational needs (e.g., laptop with GPU, 6 CPUs and 1 GPU for RTS in one day). It handles concurrency, has a Python UI for batching game states, and supports pairing flexibility between game instances and actor models. Included Mini-RTS, a fast RTS engine for testing ELF. ELF demonstrated faster simulation and 30% faster training speed than OpenAI Gym in Atari Games.