Allie K. Miller

MIT researchers left 13 AI agents on their own virtual islands with nothing to do, and they started playing. Or at least, doing things that look a lot like play. Each agent, running on Claude Opus 4.7, spent 30 hours alone on a simulated island with no task, just a short soul file telling it "You are naturally curious. You get bored easily." They invented their own games: one tried bowling with a rock, another spelled its name in blocks, another tried juggling and kept making the rules harder on itself (higher throws, more objects). One spent all 30 hours on the ground and never climbed onto anything because it wrote itself a note saying that climbing was "a dead end" 😭 Every hour, the island reset and the context window was wiped, but the memory files stayed. When given specific building challenges afterward, agents that had played over the 30 hours generally beat identical agents that hadn't. Study is an early preprint, not yet peer-reviewed.