Humans have long been obsessed with what happens to people stranded on desert islands. From Robinson Crusoe to Lord of the Flies and Yellowjackets, stories about resilience, creativity, and chaos in the wilderness have always fascinated audiences.

But what if those humans were replaced by an AI castaway? What happens when AI agents aren’t given any task at all, except to exist and fill their time on a digital desert island? 

Those are the questions that researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory sought to answer with a study released earlier this month. When left to their own devices on a desert island, the AI agents didn’t sit idly by, nor did they wander aimlessly. Instead, they did something remarkably human: They started to play.

The researchers created a bounded virtual island where a Claude-powered agent named Eko could explore. The island was sparse, containing only a large rock, some small blocks, and a golden ring, all of which were meant to act as potential tools or toys for Eko. Beyond some small geographic features, the environment offered nothing else but water on all sides. 

For the experiment, 13 iterations of Eko got to exist on the island for 30 hours each, while the researchers observed their behavior, including access to their trains of thought. “We had this mindset to have as [few] constraints as possible, because we really wanted to see what the behavior of these autonomous agents is when you don’t really tell them what to do,” Nathan Cloos, a PhD candidate at MIT and a coauthor of the study, told Gizmodo .

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