MIT researchers stranded an AI agent on a desert island. What happened could change how robots are trained

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.

Published: 2026-10-22