“It’s already known that certain bodies accelerate learning,” says Bongard. “This work shows that AI that can search for such bodies.” Bongard’s lab has developed robot bodies that are adapted to particular tasks, such as giving callus-like coatings to feet to reduce wear and tear. Gupta and his colleagues extend this idea, says Bongard. “They show that the right body can also speed up changes in the robot’s brain.”
Ultimately, this technique could reverse the way we think of building physical robots, says Gupta. Instead of starting with a fixed body configuration and then training the robot to do a particular task, you could use DERL to let the optimal body plan for that task evolve and then build that.
Gupta’s unimals are part of a broad shift in how researchers are thinking about AI. Instead of training AIs on specific tasks, such as playing Go or analyzing a medical scan, researchers are starting to drop bots into virtual sandboxes—such as POET, OpenAI’s virtual hide-and-seek arena, and DeepMind’s virtual playground XLand—and getting them to learn how to solve multiple tasks in ever-changing, open-ended training dojos. Instead of mastering a single challenge, AIs trained in this way learn general skills.
For Gupta, freeform exploration will be key for the next generation of AIs. “We need truly open-ended environments to create intelligent agents,” he says.