ABSTRACT
Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven to be a powerful paradigm for deriving complex behaviors from simple reward signals in a wide range of environments. When applying RL to continuous control agents in simulated physics environ-ments, the body is usually considered to be part of the environment. However, during evolution the physical body of biological organisms and their controlling brains are co-evolved, thus exploring a much larger space of actuator/controller configurations. Put differently, the intelligence does not reside only in the agent’s mind, but also in the design of their body. We propose a method for uncovering strong agents, consisting of a good combination of a body and policy, based on combining RL with an evolutionary proced