The Artificial Experimentalist: Discovery and Control of Self-Organizing Phenomena with Autotelic Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Existing methods for exploring cellular automata and other complex systems mostly operate in open loop: they set initial conditions, execute a full simulation, and observe the outcome, without intervening during execution. We introduce a closed-loop framework based on autotelic reinforcement learning, in which an agent autonomously samples diverse goals and learns a goal-conditioned policy to intervene in a complex system through minimal, local perturbations. We instantiate this framework on Lenia, a continuous cellular automaton known for life-like self-organizing patterns, in an agentic system we call CARL, and demonstrate three capabilities. First, CARL discovers stable solitons across a wide range of Lenia update rules at a higher rate than heuristic baselines. Second, it learns to steer the movement direction of existing solitons with few interventions, showing that CARL can control self-organizing patterns, not only create them. Third, humans can use the agents to guide solitons through maze environments in real time by specifying high-level directional commands that the agents translate into low-level interventions. Trained across diverse goals, update rules, and random initial states, the agents acquire policies that generalize zero-shot to various out-of-distribution conditions. These results suggest a path toward artificial experimentalist agents that, autonomously or with human guidance, discover and control emergent phenomena in complex systems. Companion website and code available at: https://developmentalsystems.org/carl/