MIT Experiment: 13 AI Agents Sent to a Virtual Desert Island, Spontaneously Playing Games, Mourning a Lost Ring, and Enhancing Their Task Performance
MIT researchers placed 13 AI agents based on Claude Opus 4.7 (Eko) in a virtual deserted island with no task instructions for 30 hours, observing that they spontaneously invented games, expressed anthropomorphic emotions (such as mourning a lost gold ring), explored physical mechanisms, and significantly outperformed the control group of agents that had not experienced a “play period” in subsequent targeted tasks.