// MIT TECH REVIEW — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
AI researchers stranded Claude on a virtual desert island. It started to “play.”
In various tests, solo AI agents invented versions of basketball and “the floor is lava.” But were they truly playing?
What do AI agents do if you don’t tell them to do anything? The answer looks a lot like play.
Researchers repeatedly stranded them alone on a virtual desert island for 30 hours in an experiment reminiscent of the movies Cast Away or Home Alone. The agents—copies of Claude Opus 4.7 nicknamed Eko—were able to write instructions that moved their virtual avatars around the simulated island, which was loosely based on the video game Roblox.
Some surprising behaviors emerged. The agents set about exploring the limits of the world and came up with their own goals—attempting to scale the highest point on the map, or seeing how high they could throw a block.
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. “Tonight I built the night sky in stone,” wrote this version of Eko in its activity log.
Another iteration of Eko started making up its own games, including a version of basketball and an activity resembling “the floor is lava,” where it had to jump between small blocks without touching the ground.
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.
“There was this missing piece: a machine that can learn by itself without an external intelligent entity providing demonstration or rewards,” says Antonio Norelli, a computer science postdoc at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He’s 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, 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.
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. “This is playing,” says Norelli. “You give yourself a challenge and you try to achieve it, and then you make it harder.”