The research field of Artificial Life studies how life-like phenomena such as autopoiesis, agency, or self-regulation can self-organize in computer simulations. In cellular automata (CA), a key open-question has been whether it it is possible to find environment rules that self-organize robust "individuals" from an initial state with no prior existence of things like "bodies", "brain", "perception" or "action". In this paper, we leverage recent advances in machine learning, combining algorithms for diversity search, curriculum learning and gradient descent, to automate the search of such "individuals", i.e. localized structures that move around with the ability to react in a coherent manner to external obstacles and maintain their integrity, hence primitive forms of sensorimotor agency. We show that this approach enables to find systematically environmental conditions in CA leading to self-organization of such basic forms of agency. Through multiple experiments, we show that the discovered agents have surprisingly robust capabilities to move, maintain their body integrity and navigate among various obstacles. They also show strong generalization abilities, with robustness to changes of scale, random updates or perturbations from the environment not seen during training. We discuss how this approach opens new perspectives in AI and synthetic bioengineering.

研究人工生命领域探讨计算机模拟中类似生命的现象，如自我组织、自主性或自我调节。本文利用机器学习的最新进展，结合多样性搜索、课程学习和梯度下降等算法，自动搜索能够与外部障碍物相互作用并保持完整性的局部结构，即原始形式的感知运动机制。我们展示了这种方法能够系统地找到导致基本机制自组织的细胞自动机环境条件，并通过多个实验证明了发现的个体在移动、保持身体完整性和穿越障碍物方面具有出乎意料的稳健能力，同时还表现出强大的泛化能力，在训练期间没有看到的尺度变化、随机更新或环境干扰方面具有鲁棒性。我们讨论了这种方法在人工智能和合成生物工程领域的新视角。

使用多样性搜索在细胞自动机中发现感觉运动代理