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

arXiv cs.AIAugust 28, 2026en

arXiv:2608.26116v1 Announce Type: new 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.

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