Pyodide: Interesting Approach to Python in the Browser

[norvig]

Pyodide: Python + NumPy, Pandas, Scipy, and Matplotlib in the Browser.

Could this be used by aima-python?

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/04/pyodide-bringing-the-scientific-python-stack-to-the-browser/

[antmarakis]

I think it could be used in conjunction with what we have now. Linking to the Pyodide notebooks somewhere on the README and maybe intro/index.ipynb could work. In terms of requirements, our notebooks don't use any libraries outside the matplotlib/numpy, so we should be fine.

This is definitely something to keep an eye on, maybe the GSoC student can port some stuff over?

[JaakTepandi]

Depends on the goals. It's interesting how Pyodide might fit into current aima-python framework. Seems aima-python has dealt mainly with AI algorithms; infrastructure / use in production has not been a significant topic. Pyodide might give a usability enhancement - ease notebook usage (although the demo seems slow), sth like "aima-python in browser". This could be also a component of a new "feature" (and a set of directories), sth like "aima-python in web dev" - many people could be interested in this. Or a step towards high volume data processing ("scaling aima-python up ").

[dmeoli]

Closing as a stale discussion. Pyodide has matured a lot since 2019, but there's no concrete task/owner here — running aima-python's notebooks in the browser would be its own focused effort. Happy to reopen if someone wants to drive a specific browser-execution goal.

[redblobgames]

Context for this issue, from ~10 years ago: There was a desire to have an interactive web companion to AIMA. We tried some Python tech but nothing worked at the time, so we started a sister project, aima-javascript, to reimplement things in JS. We only got a few chapters implemented https://aimacode.github.io/aima-javascript/ (for example, chapter 5). But Javascript isn't the preferred language for AI projects, and the project didn't gain traction. So if there were a specific idea here I think it would be to make a web companion of the textbook using python instead of javascript.

There are more ways to put notebooks on the web now than in 2019 when this issue was created, and they seem more polished. For example the new book from Gabriel Peyre https://www.gpeyre.com/ot4ml/myst/_build/html/semidiscrete-w1/ has interactive diagrams created from python notebooks.

[dmeoli]

Reopening — thanks @redblobgames, that context is really helpful, and I agree this is worth keeping open as a forward-looking direction now that the tooling has caught up.

Concretely, a Python web companion looks feasible today with options that didn't exist (or weren't polished) in 2019:

• JupyterLite / Pyodide — run the existing *.ipynb notebooks fully in the browser, no server, deployable as static files.
• Jupyter Book / MyST — a textbook-style interactive site built from the notebooks (like the Peyré example you linked), with executable/interactive cells.

There's also a nice synergy: we just set up a GitHub Pages deployment for the Sphinx API docs (now live at https://aimacode.github.io/aima-python/), so the same Pages pipeline could host a JupyterLite/MyST companion alongside the reference docs.

Keeping this open to track the idea; a good first concrete step would be a small JupyterLite proof-of-concept deploying one or two notebooks (e.g. search.ipynb) to Pages.