# Raw notes
"The field of embodied cognition posits that intelligent behaviors can be rapidly learned by agents whose morphologies are well adapted to their environment" 3-5
9,10 - embodied agents
Difficulties
- morphologies have large search spaces; leading to compromises:
- limited morphlogical search spaces 11-17
- hand-designed morphology 17-20
- lifetime learning to evaluate fitness of a morph + control needs lots of computation; leading to compromises:
- learn control from something over than raw sensors (11-13, 16, 21-24)
- learn <=100 parameters of hand-designed controllers (11-13, 16, 24)
- learn to predict the fitness of a morphlogy 15, 21
- mimic Lamarckian evo by giving offspring learned information from parent (12, 15)
- limiting the degrees of freedom (13,15)
- using cuboids to "simplify the problem" (11-13)
11 - Sims
12 - 2019 - Jelisavcic - Lamarkian Evolution
13 - 2014 - Auerbach, Bongard - Environmental influence on the evolution of morphology complexity
14 - Auerbach - Robogen: Alife 2014
15 - 2019 - Wang, Zhou, Fidler, Ba ICLR ???? (Predict fitness)
16 - Miras, De Carlo, Akhatou, Eiben - Apps of Evo
17 - Liao 2019
18 - Luck, et al. Data-efficient co-adaptation of morphology and behavior with deep RL
21 - Robogrammar
22 - Cheney, MacCurdy, Clune, Lipson, Unshackling Evoliution
23 - Cheney Bongard, SunSpiral, Lipson. Scalable co-optimization of morph and control in embodied machines.
Key Claimed Contributions
- eval morph by measuring speed to learn a suite of tasks
- role of environmental complexity
- demonstrate morphological Baldwin effect
- evolution rapidly selects morphs that learn faster, enabling behaviors learned late in life of early ancestors to be expressed early in lifetime of descendants.
- "mechanistic" foundation that morphs that are physically stable and energy efficient are better suited for learning
## Approach
- Nero style learning (?)
- "lifetime learning using RL" (34)
- tournaments in groups of four, mutated copy added to the pop
- PPO
- 1152 CPUs over 16 hours
### UNIMAL - parameterization of morphology
Morphology is represented by a kinematic tree corresponding to a hierarchy of 3d rigid parts. Parts are connected by motor-actuated hinge joints.
Parts are either spheres (the root/head) or capsules (limbs)
### Mutations