It's not quite the same as active learning. Experimentation and active learning are quite different in ways I didn't fully appreciate at the beginning of my car

It's not quite the same as active learning. Experimentation and active learning are quite different in ways I didn't fully appreciate at the beginning of my career, and they come in the form of (conditional) independence relations, which you can get around with either structural assumptions or randomized intervention. It's the entire reason why we randomize in experiments. In active learning, the machine doesn't know what happens when the rooster is in a bag, so decides to try it. In a randomized experiment, the machine knows what happens when the rooster is in a bag, but thinks there might be other factors at work, so it decides to try it in a way that it can be sure that all other factors are equal (at least on average).