MIT Strands AI Agent Eko on a Virtual Island for 30 Hours
A team at MIT CSAIL placed Eko, an agent powered by Claude Code with a virtual lobster-like body, in a bounded virtual island containing movable blocks, a rock and a golden ring, and let 13 instances roam freely for up to 30 hours with little instruction. The Ekos spelled their name with blocks, built a “temple” and a Stonehenge-like monument, and erected a memorial for objects lost to the simulated ocean; one stacked blocks to reach a spire previously out of reach. The researchers say the agents' chain-of-thought transcripts show a quasi-scientific loop of observation, hypothesis and experiment, and that six of them independently discovered a mid-jump block throw that its designers had not coded in.
It suggests some agent capabilities may come from autonomous, play-like exploration in safe environments rather than only from human-set objective functions.