AI agents left to explore a virtual island without a specific task began inventing challenges of their own. MIT researchers say the behavior bears the hallmarks of play.

7, alone on a simulated desert island for 30 hours. They describe the experiment in a paper posted on arXiv, a site where researchers share studies before peer review.

Afterward, they gave the agents specific challenges, like getting as many objects as possible onto the island’s tallest rock spire. The Eko agents that had spent those 30 hours playing generally beat identical agents that had never set foot on the island.

Today, developers decide in advance what AI should practice and what counts as success. The researchers see this technique — exploring without a goal — as a different way for AI agents to learn skills, especially skills that could one day be used to control robots.

“We normally develop artificial agents by deciding in advance what they should practice, what they should optimize, and what counts as progress,” the researchers write in their report. “Play suggests another regime: give an agent a sufficiently rich and safe world, let it choose what is interesting, and allow useful knowledge to accumulate from the history that follows.”

“Let me observe my surroundings,” one Eko wrote in its first hour on the island. Ambitiously, it set out to conquer the island’s tallest spire. But an hour later, after failing, it came back with a backup plan: it hauled the rock up a neighboring summit, stacked two blocks on top of it, and leapt.

“I’M ON THE SPIRE,” it wrote.

The agent’s next big moment went worse. Testing how far it could throw a golden ring, it wound up and sent it straight into the ocean. “Ouch. Lost the Ring.” it wrote, before deciding to “pivot to something achievable and meaningful” — building a heart made of stones, “a memorial to the lost Ring.”

When the game reset and ring reappeared, Eko put it straight to work as a basketball hoop, a target and, eventually, an accessory.

When the game wouldn’t let Eko put the ring around its own body, Eko figured out a workaround, that falling off the edge of the cliff would make it respawn in the same area as the ring.

It stepped off the edge and dropped back in, right through the middle of the ring.