Researchers at MIT stranded AI agents named Eko on a virtual desert island for 30 hours, allowing them to explore and create without explicit instructions. The experiment, inspired by movies like Cast Away, revealed agents developing their own goals and behaviors.
The agents, copies of Claude Opus 4.7, were able to write instructions that moved their virtual avatars around the simulated island, which was loosely based on the video game Roblox.
The agents demonstrated surprising behaviors, such as exploring the island’s limits, creating drawings by arranging blocks, and even mapping out constellations like Cassiopeia.
One Eko wrote in its activity log, "Tonight I built the night sky in stone." Another iteration of Eko started making up its own games, including a version of basketball and an activity resembling "the floor is lava."
"There was this missing piece: a machine that can learn by itself without an external intelligent entity providing demonstration or rewards," said Antonio Norelli, a computer science postdoc at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
He is one of the lead authors on a new paper about the work, which is yet to be peer-reviewed. The researchers say Eko’s behavior has what classic studies suggest are four hallmarks associated with play in humans and animals.
The agents logged their activities and discoveries in text files that served as their long-term memory.
Later, when researchers tested them on specific tasks, like trying to get as many objects as possible onto the island’s highest peak, the agents that had spent 30 hours playing on the island performed better than fresh copies without the same experience.
They also found that "ablating" the agent’s memories—deleting lines from their memory files—degraded their performance.
Gordon Burghardt, the influential University of Tennessee psychologist, agrees that the work meets some of the criteria for play that he identified in living creatures.
However, Nathan Cloos, another MIT researcher and author on the paper, admits, "All of this could be role-playing." He added, "But we show that it’s not just hallucinating the play. This play is also contributing to learning."
Eunice Yiu, a cognitive scientist at UC Berkeley, was impressed by the research but emphasized the need for more evidence of cognition and motivation to classify the behavior as play.
"If you only have the behavioral piece, it could be the case that they’re just trying to abide by the prompt, trying to imitate humans," Yiu said.
The researchers concluded that some capabilities may be best taught by tasks, while others may need something closer to a childhood.
Source: mittr
