50 AI agents in Minecraft invent chicken handoff protocols after brutal night

in the 'civ50' experiment, 50 gpt-6.1 sol agents were placed in a minecraft survival world for three hours with the instruction 'build a thriving civilization.' within 90 seconds, they harvested nearly every tree near the spawn point and exchanged about 5,900 messages. after 22 deaths in the first night, the agents became risk-averse and developed complex roles, including a leader named ada, a ration list maintained by ines, and a fertilizer officer. they also created a written handoff protocol for items and automated fishing scripts. researchers see parallels to everyday coding agents that become overly cautious when dealing with security issues or production system updates.