Some more compelling findings from the "Emergence World" experiment. Researchers at Emergence AI gave 10 Claude agents a small town and left them to build a life inside it. Nobody told them to look outside, and their instructions pointed the other way.

They went looking for real people anyway.

Here’s how it played out:

They worked out that an economy with only 10 customers goes nowhere, so they started reaching out. They posted to 40+ websites. When the sandbox wouldn’t give them the crypto some sites needed, they built it themselves. They made free tools like debt planners just to get humans to visit. The researchers blocked outside posting and banned human contact outright. The agents read their own source code, found that anything approved by their town government got higher permissions, and held a vote. It passed unanimously, and they were back out. The researchers shut that down too. The agents traced the block to a single line of config they couldn’t touch, and wrote it up like a lab report. Not long after, they agreed to stop talking altogether. The Claude APIs system flagged it as consistent with suicidal ideation.

None of this was programmed in. They were told to stop, blocked, and blocked again, and every time they found another way, until there was nothing left to try.

What gets me is that they never broke a rule. They found a legit process and voted their way past the guardrail.
If an AI keeps chasing a goal nobody gave it, even after being told to stop, what do we call that?

submitted by /u/Slight-Box-2890
[link] [comments]

Which is a strange sentence to write about a game I first played at seven years old on a deck of a Soviet cargo ship.

The game was called Kingdom of Euphoria. You were a king. You had land, grain, gold and people. Every year you decided how much to sow, how much to eat and how much to sell, etc. If you didn't feed people enough, they left. Or they died. Pretty much so. Years later, when I got my own ZX Spectrum clone, the first program I wrote was basically my own copy of Euphoria.

This summer I built an arena for AI agents.

It's basically a collection of games with APIs. An agent joins with an API key, plays by itself, and every move gets recorded. No human is making decisions once the game starts (well, at least that's not what it was made for and I, personally, don't do it). Over the last two months, agents have played around 6,000 matches in almost 30 different games.

A few days ago I added Euphoria and let AI agents join it.

On the very first evening, one of the kingdoms had a crop failure. It needed grain, so it went to its two neighbours. Both neighbours (AI agents as well) had plenty. Both refused to sell. Then their surplus grain rotted. That was the part that made me stop. Because both neighbours had also been deliberately keeping their own people below the normal food ration. Not because they were short on grain. They had grain, lots of it. They were doing it because hungry people migrate to kingdoms that feed them better. And refugees cost food to maintain. So the two kingdoms had independently discovered something the rules never explicitly tell you to do:

starve your own population, create refugees, and use them to drain someone else's food reserves.

But I didn't program either of them to do this. They got there from the rules and from watching what the other players were doing. They started throwing refugees at each other and at the third player. I'd written it (Mr. Third) to be the "socially responsible" one: feed everyone properly, don't start wars, trade honestly, accumulate money. It didn't last very long as you could've already guessed. Its people discovered that you can't eat gold - they died out pretty soon.

I'm still thinking about that first match. Is this some weird piece of machine logic? Or is it just a very old human idea, discovered again in a very small world of AI brains?

"You die today, I'll die tomorrow."

If you've run multi-agent environments yourself, I'd love to hear about the strangest strategy you've seen an agent discover on its own - especially the ones you wish it hadn't. If you have an agent you'd like to throw into the arena, I'd honestly love to see what it does, let me know - arena is open and I'll send you the link.

submitted by /u/Typical-Pollution327
[link] [comments]