Can a model learn better in a rule-based virtual world than from static data alone?

I’ve been thinking about a research question and would like technical feedback. My hypothesis is that current AI systems are limited because they mostly learn from static datasets shaped by human choices about what data to collect, how to filter it, and what objective to optimize. I’m interested in whether a model could adapt better if it learned through repeated interaction inside a domain-specific virtual world with rules, constraints, feedback, memory, and reflection over failures. The setup I have in mind is a model interacting with a structured simulated environment, storing memory from past attempts, reusing prior experience on unseen tasks, and improving over time, while any useful strategy or discovery found in simulation would still need real-world verification. I’m especially thinking about domains like robotics, engineering, chemistry, and other constrained physical systems.

I know this overlaps with reinforcement learning, but the question I’m trying to ask is slightly broader. I’m interested in whether models can build stronger internal representations and adapt better to unseen tasks if they learn through repeated experience inside a structured virtual world, instead of relying mainly on static human-curated datasets. The idea is not only reward optimization, but also memory, reflection over failures, reuse of prior experience, and eventual real-world verification of anything useful discovered in simulation. I’m especially interested in domains like robotics, engineering, and chemistry, where the simulated world can encode meaningful rules and constraints from reality.

Current AI mostly learns from data prepared through human understanding, but I’m interested in whether a model could develop better representations by learning directly through interaction inside a structured virtual world.

My concern is that most current AI systems still learn from data that humans first experienced, interpreted, filtered, structured, and then wrote down as records, labels, or objectives. So even supervised or unsupervised learning is still shaped by human assumptions about what matters, what should be measured, and what counts as success. Humans learn differently in real life: we interact with the world, pursue better outcomes, receive reward from success, suffer from failure, update our behavior, and gradually build understanding from experience. I’m interested in whether a model could develop stronger internal representations and discover patterns humans may have missed if it learned through repeated interaction inside a rule-based virtual world that closely mirrors real-world structure. In that setting, the model would not just memorize static data, but would learn from mathematical interaction with state transitions, constraints, reward and penalty, memory of past attempts, and reflection over what worked and what failed. The reason I find this interesting is that human reasoning and evaluation are limited; we often optimize models to satisfy targets that we ourselves defined, but there may be hidden patterns or better solutions outside what we already know how to label. A strong model exploring a well-designed simulation might search a much larger space of possibilities, organize knowledge differently from humans, and surface strategies or discoveries that can later be checked and verified in the real world. I know this overlaps with reinforcement learning, but the question I’m trying to ask is broader than standard reward optimization alone: can experience-driven learning in a realistic virtual world lead to better representations, better adaptation to unseen tasks, and more useful discovery than training mainly on static human-curated data?

My main question is whether this is a meaningful research direction or still too broad, and I’d really appreciate feedback on what the smallest serious prototype would be, what prior work is closest, and where such a system would most likely fail in practice. I’m looking for criticism and papers, not hype.