Left 30 hours undelivered on a virtual island, 13 IA MIT agents started playing, and became better then

Eko agents, based on Claude Opus 4.7, invented games, erected a memorial for a lost ring and discovered only techniques that helped them in the following tasks.

MIT researchers laid 13 agents named Eko on a simulated desert island, all led by Claude Opus 4.7, and left them there for 30 hours without any task. Instead of remaining inactive, agents spontaneously invented games and challenges. One of them, after inadvertently throwing a gold ring into the ocean, built a stone memorial; Another realized that he could retrieve it and carry it by deliberately throwing himself from a cliff to reappear in the same place.

A useful "childhood"

Six of the thirteen officers also found, each on their side, that they threw the blocks further away by dropping them in the middle of a jump, a technique that the researchers had not anticipated. Then faced with specific challenges, such as moving objects to the highest rocky peak on the island, these agents did better overall than identical agents without prior experience on the island.

For the authors, whose study is published on arXiv before peer review, some abilities may not be achieved by directly optimizing a task: offering an agent a rich and safe world, letting him choose what interests him and accumulating knowledge over his history would be more like a childhood than a training.