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These weird virtual creatures mutate their bodies to solve problems | MIT Technology Review

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They show how intelligence and body plans are closely linked—and could unlock AI for robots.

These weird virtual creatures mutate their bodies to solve problems | MIT Technology Review Skip to Content An endless variety of virtual creatures scamper and scuttle across the screen, struggling over obstacles or dragging balls toward a target. They look like half-formed crabs made of sausages—or perhaps Thing, the disembodied hand from The Addams Family . But these "unimals" (short for “universal animals”) could in fact help researchers develop more general-purpose intelligence in machines. Agrim Gupta of Stanford University and his colleagues (including Fei-Fei Li, who co-directs the Stan

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