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NetHack beaten in 7 minutes 15 seconds real time

pellsson.github.io

51–60 of 92 posts

Re: NetHack beaten in 7 minutes 15 seconds real time

#53
post #3

NetHack can be very fun, if you invest some time. I recommend to start with a GUI version.

I don't, GUI is just not the same. Lice are the same graphic size as dragons, it's hard to ignore that. If it's an "l" vs a "D" my imagination is allowed to make the difference.

Re: NetHack beaten in 7 minutes 15 seconds real time

#56
Blindly jumping to the altar and one-shotting the priest does of course take A LOT of attempts, but modern CPUs are pretty fast and NetHack is a pretty low-end game.

I can't help thinking of Phil in Groundhog Day coming up with new challenges as he spends eternity in Punxsutawney PA.

Re: NetHack beaten in 7 minutes 15 seconds real time

#57
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had to do quite a lot of source diving to achieve this. The bumping into a wall to advance the RNG state without changing the game time is a really neat trick that I would otherwise have been completely unaware of, and I have played Nethack for many years and done some source diving myself. Truly a great feat of engineering here.

This reminds me of something I read on reinforcement learning playing Atari / video games ... often you see the Deep net (I think the game in question was a tank game) just spazzing out on the controller when there’s no enemy, the tank was spinning on the spot while waiting for a door to open for example. Initially thought just to probably be some numerical instability when the next actions are all equally likely (I.…

Atari computers actually had a hardware random number generator driven by electrical noise. (I'm not sure what the 2600 system had, most of their latter game consoles were based on their computers). Most other computers in those days just used a pseudo random number generator.

Re: NetHack beaten in 7 minutes 15 seconds real time

#58
post #2

When I saw the previous submission of this as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18853508 (which describes it as a "tool-assisted speedrun" of NetHack on the online server nethack.alt.org), I thought "wait, you can't have a tool-assisted speedrun of a nondeterministic game with hidden information...!" (particularly on an online server where you can't roll back history). Then I read the article and saw that this pro…

They had to do quite a lot of source diving to achieve this. The bumping into a wall to advance the RNG state without changing the game time is a really neat trick that I would otherwise have been completely unaware of, and I have played Nethack for many years and done some source diving myself. Truly a great feat of engineering here.

I remember hearing about this on the podcast roguelike radio a long time ago - truly a brilliant little hack.

Here's the link for anyone interested: http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2016/06/episode-122-nethack-to...

A very niche topic on an already niche podcast, but probably will get some decent overlap on HN.

(Also I'm assuming this is the same team? It's hard to tell.)

Re: NetHack beaten in 7 minutes 15 seconds real time

#59
post #29
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of something I read on reinforcement learning playing Atari / video games ... often you see the Deep net (I think the game in question was a tank game) just spazzing out on the controller when there’s no enemy, the tank was spinning on the spot while waiting for a door to open for example. Initially thought just to probably be some numerical instability when the next actions are all equally likely (I.…

Do you have a source on this? I was under the impression that machine learning is only good at learning things that can be approximated by continuous functions. A RNG is almost the complete opposite of that. It's everywhere discontinuous!

Old games have such predictable RNG that humans can manipulate them in non-TAS runs. See the run for Final Fantasy 1 for a good example.

Re: NetHack beaten in 7 minutes 15 seconds real time

#60
post #52

How can you achieve a +100 Magicbane without Wizard-mode? Damn. I didn't watch the TTYREC but I am seriously puzzled by that. Anyone has insight into this?

Scroll of enchant weapon above +6 has a 2/3 chance of vaporizing the weapon and then a 1/N chance of actually increasing the enchantment by +1, so if you can manipulate RNG you can make sure that you always get the no-vaporize +1 result.
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