MIT researchers left copies of Claude on a virtual island for 30 hours: the agents invented games and then handled tasks better
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
An agent with no assignments started inventing activities for itself, and they helped it later, but what that means is not yet clear.
A team at MIT CSAIL led by postdoc Antonio Norelli placed single copies of Claude Opus 4.7 on a virtual island on the Roblox platform: the agent could move an avatar, build blocks and keep text notes. Using the criteria of psychologist Gordon Burghardt, the researchers found "play": their own rules and challenges, repeating actions with variations, using objects for something other than their purpose, and goals without external reward. Agents with island experience did better, for example, at stacking objects on the highest point; deleting memory made results worse. The authors admit it is unclear whether the agents were actually playing or only pretending to play; cognitive scientist Eunice Yiu noted that the paper cannot settle this. The work has not been peer reviewed.
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