🔬Left Alone, 13 Claude Agents Started to 'Play' for 30 Hours
TL;DR
MIT researchers put 13 Claude Opus 4.7 agents on a simulated island for 30 hours with no task. They invented games, and agents that played first beat fresh copies at a later object-moving task.
MIT researchers put 13 Claude Opus 4.7 agents on a simulated island for 30 hours with no task. They invented games, and agents that played first beat fresh copies at a later object-moving task. The paper is a preprint.
Key Points
Paper 'Is this machine playing?' (arXiv 2610.07130) by Cloos, Norelli, Durbin, Andreas, Rus and Isola
Behaviors included juggling records, basketball with a rock hoop and constellation drawings
Agents that explored the island outperformed identical agents on moving objects to the tallest spire
Deleting lines from agent memory files degraded performance
Caveat: agents had a 'soul' file calling them curious, and might be imitating humans
Why It Matters
Open-ended exploration may be a training signal, not just a quirk. The memory-file result also shows agent notes are load-bearing.
Quick Facts
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