What do AI agents do if you don\u2019t tell them to do anything? The answer looks a lot like play.<\/p>\n
Researchers repeatedly stranded them alone on a virtual desert island for 30 hours in an experiment reminiscent of the movies Cast Away<\/em> or Home Alone<\/em>. The agents\u2014copies of Claude Opus 4.7 nicknamed Eko\u2014were able to write instructions that moved their virtual avatars around the simulated island, which was loosely based on the video game Roblox.<\/p>\n Some surprising behaviors emerged. The agents set about exploring the limits of the world and came up with their own goals\u2014attempting to scale the highest point on the map, or seeing how high they could throw a block.<\/p>\n When one agent discovered it could create new blocks by throwing and dropping a larger rock, it began to create drawings by arranging blocks on the ground, starting with simple patterns like hearts and pyramids but eventually writing its own name and even mapping out constellations like Cassiopeia. \u201cTonight I built the night sky in stone,\u201d wrote this version of Eko in its activity log. <\/p>\n Another iteration of Eko started making up its own games, including a version of basketball and an activity resembling \u201cthe floor is lava,\u201d where it had to jump between small blocks without touching the ground.<\/p>\n AI systems are usually trained through supervised learning, where they copy examples provided by humans, or through reinforcement learning, where they pursue a reward through trial and error. This experiment hints at a third approach: playful learning. <\/p>\n \u201cThere was this missing piece: a machine that can learn by itself without an external intelligent entity providing demonstration or rewards,\u201d says Antonio Norelli, a computer science postdoc at MIT\u2019s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He\u2019s one of the lead authors on a new paper about the work, which is yet to be peer-reviewed.<\/p>\n The researchers say Eko\u2019s behavior has what classic studies, including work by the influential University of Tennessee psychologist Gordon Burghardt, suggest are four hallmarks associated with play in humans and animals: The agents invented their own rules and challenges, repeated activities with slight variations, pretended objects were other objects, and pursued goals just for the sake of it. <\/p>\n Norelli highlights an example where Eko started juggling and set a record of 50 consecutive catches. Eko then decided that the catches had happened too quickly to really count, so it canceled its record and started again with stricter rules. \u201cThis is playing,\u201d says Norelli. \u201cYou give yourself a challenge and you try to achieve it, and then you make it harder.\u201d<\/p>\n As the agents explored the island, they 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\u2019s 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 \u201cablating\u201d the agent\u2019s memories\u2014deleting lines from their memory files\u2014degraded their performance. (Add One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest<\/em> to that list of movie references.)<\/p>\n Burghardt, the Tennessee psychologist, agrees that the work meets some of the criteria for play that he identified in living creatures. But was Eko actually playing, or was the word-prediction engine simply role-playing what a playful agent would do in this scenario? \u201cAll of this could be role-playing,\u201d admits Nathan Cloos, another MIT researcher and author on the paper. \u201cBut we show that it\u2019s not just hallucinating the play. This play is also contributing to learning.\u201d<\/p>\n Eunice Yiu, a cognitive scientist at UC Berkeley who studies exploration in children and AI, was impressed by the research but says to really classify the behavior as play, you\u2019d need to see more evidence of cognition and motivation underpinning it. <\/p>\n \u201cIt could be the case that the models are genuinely playing, but we don\u2019t know based on the paper,\u201d Yiu says. \u201cIf you only have the behavioral piece, it could be the case that they\u2019re just trying to abide by the prompt, trying to imitate humans.\u201d<\/p>\n Research into AI agents has been criticized for anthropomorphizing them, and this research setup did a lot to nudge the agents toward behaving like humans. Although Eko was not explicitly instructed to invent games or explore the island, it did have a master prompt in the form of a \u201csoul\u201d file, a text document that described it as \u201cnaturally curious\u201d and eager to explore. <\/p>\n Eko did also frequently just stand there doing nothing until it was kicked back into life with a \u201ccontinuation prompt\u201d that read, \u201cPlease don\u2019t stop. Just continue doing whatever you want to do.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not like this is a system that just suddenly magically decided to play,\u201d says Phillip Isola, an MIT professor and a coauthor of the paper. \u201cIt\u2019s an artifact that learned from our culture, was trained by engineers at Anthropic, and was then placed on an island by us,\u201d he says. \u201cIt does things that surprise us and that are causally related to its future skillful behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n As large language models make the step from software into hardware like humanoid robots, exploring spaces without a specific goal in mind could eventually help them flexibly adapt to unexpected situations. <\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of work that\u2019s just on exploiting AI, making it better and faster,\u201d says Yiu. \u201cBut in terms of building world models and exploration, I think that [they are] still a big part that deserves attention, especially if we want to generalize and prepare ourselves for new environments.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPerhaps some capabilities are best taught by tasks,\u201d the paper concludes. \u201cOthers may need something closer to a childhood.\u201d Ultimately, the question of whether AI agents are actually playing or just imitating play may not actually matter.<\/p>\n \n #researchers #stranded #Claude #virtual #desert #island #started #play<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What do AI agents do if you don\u2019t tell them to do anything? The answer…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24323,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[1048,7801,2907,600,5540,2687,1423,4123],"class_list":["post-24322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories","tag-claude","tag-desert","tag-island","tag-play","tag-researchers","tag-started","tag-stranded","tag-virtual"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/261016_AgentsonIsland.jpg",1200,600,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/261016_AgentsonIsland-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/261016_AgentsonIsland-300x150.jpg",300,150,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/261016_AgentsonIsland-768x384.jpg",640,320,true],"large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/261016_AgentsonIsland-1024x512.jpg",640,320,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/261016_AgentsonIsland.jpg",1200,600,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/261016_AgentsonIsland.jpg",1200,600,false],"covernews-featured":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/261016_AgentsonIsland-1024x512.jpg",1024,512,true],"covernews-medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/261016_AgentsonIsland-540x340.jpg",540,340,true]},"author_info":{"display_name":"admin","author_link":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?author=1"},"category_info":"Stories<\/a>","tag_info":"Stories","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24322\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"During](\"https:\/\/wp.technologyreview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/261016_AgentsonIsland_embed1.png?w=840\")
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