Can the Q-learning algorithm be utilized to build the simulation itself?
Only in the presence of a meta-environment, or meta-simulation where the goals of creating the original simulation are encoded in the states, available actions and rewards.
A special case of this might be in model-learning planning algorithms where there exists a "real" environment to refer to, and the agent benefits from exploring it and constructing a statistical model that it can then use to create an approximate simulation of the outcomes of sequences of actions. The Dyna-Q algorithm, which is a simple extension of Q-learning, is an example of this kind of model building approach. The simulation is very basic - it simply replays previous relevant experience. But you could consider this as an example of the agent constructing a simulation.
Getting an agent to act like a researcher and actually design and/or code a simulation from scratch would require a different kind of meta-environment. It is theoretically possible, but likely very hard to implement in general way - even figuring out the reward scheme to express the goals of such an agent could be a challenge. I'm not aware of any examples, but entirely possible someone has attempted this kind of meta agent, because it is an interesting idea.
Possibly the simplest example would be a gridworld meta-environment where a "designer" agent could select the layout of objects in the maze, with the goal of making a second "explorer" agent's task progressivley more difficult. The designer would be "creating the simulation" only in a very abstract way though, by setting easy-to-manage parameters of the environment, not writing low level code.
There is not much difference between the approach above and having two opposing agents playing a game. It is different from a turn-based game like chess in that each agent would complete a full episode, and then be rewarded by the outcome at the end of the combined two episodes. There are some similarities to GANs for image generation.
