Left alone with nothing to do, AI agents started playing

MIT researchers marooned 13 AIs on a virtual island, and they responded by inventing games, mourning a lost ring and, eventually, getting better at their jobs.

Key points

• MIT researchers marooned 13 AIs on a virtual island, and they responded by inventing games, mourning a lost ring and, eventually, getting better at their jobs.

From the report

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AI agents left to explore a virtual island without a specific task began inventing challenges of their own. MIT researchers say the behavior bears the hallmarks of play.

The researchers put 13 AI agents called Eko, each running on Claude Opus 4.7, alone on a simulated desert island for 30 hours. They describe the experiment in a paper posted on arXiv, a site where researchers share studies before peer review. Afterward, they gave the agents specific challenges, like getting as many objects as possible onto the island’s tallest rock spire. The Eko agents that had spent those 30 hours playing generally beat identical agents that had never set foot on the island.

Today, developers decide in advance what AI should practice and what counts as success. The researchers see this technique — exploring without a goal — as a different way for AI agents to learn skills, especially skills that could one day be used to control robots.

“We normally develop artificial agents by deciding in advance what they should practice, what the