You might look at the work of Rodney Brooks. There was a wonderful documentary called "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control", and I'm pretty sure it was in there that he explains his notion that true intelligence is embodied. That was years ago and I haven't kept up with the field, but perhaps it's a useful starting point for you.
Cool, thanks. I think the idea is also important to Zoltan Torey, who believed that "consciousness" is essentially a simulation of a kind of arm in our mind. ("The Conscious Mind"). But I've never heard of anyone attempting to train an AI within a simulated world. The nice thing about doing that is that aren't limited by physics of robotics. I suspect that for basic intelligence stuff, relatively lo-fidelity simulation would be sufficient. (Although there are some very important moral issues presented by such a program!)
Thanks for the link! That's pretty close to what I mean; but I was thinking more like an embodied AI living in a simulated world. So, for example, you might start from a Counter-Strike bot, input to the bot would be it's 'camera', and output would be it's position and actions.
