A Minecraft town of AI characters made friends, invented jobs, and spread religion | MIT Technology Review

Super interesting way to experiment with large scale AI "agent" interactions.

The team scaled up, pushing the number of agents in each simulation to the maximum the Minecraft server could handle without glitching—up to 1,000 at once in some cases. In one of Altera’s 500-agent simulations, they watched how the agents spontaneously came up with and then spread cultural memes (such as a fondness for pranking, or an interest in eco-related issues) among their fellow agents. The team also seeded a small group of agents to try to spread the (parody) religion Pastafarianism around different towns and rural areas that made up the in-game world, and watched as these Pastafarian priests converted many of the agents they interacted with. The converts went on to spread Pastafarianism (the word of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) to nearby towns in the game world.

It is incredible to me that some of the emergent things we see human society create happened here as well.