If you find this interesting, take note that people were writing bots to beat Rogue over 30 years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)#Automated_pl...
First NetHack bot ascension
21–30 of 89 posts
Re: First NetHack bot ascension
#22Reading through the comments, I realized that people even do speedruns in Nethack... impressive.
People do blindfolded runs of Mike Tyson's Punch Out! Which is also impressive.
Blindfolded Zelda: OOT is a thing too, they did it live at AGDQ this year.
Re: First NetHack bot ascension
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I add to the point: doing it on a game many can't even make half way through.
My first nethack game? I was locked in a room without door and was killed by a falling rock. I don't even know why I ever played another game :-) And yes, there was a big gap until the next game. As a beginner that's all you ever do, die, die, die.
Similar experience with ADOM, it even has a special location which becomes reachable only after the game killed your 100th hero. Got to this point in a few days back then, I wish there was something good for 1000th death, that was when I started to know what I'm doing :)
Re: First NetHack bot ascension
#24Reading through the comments, I realized that people even do speedruns in Nethack... impressive.
Why is it surprising? (And I do not at all mean that in a snarky tone. I've been lurking in the nethack community for so long that it seems perfectly natural to me)
The speedruns most people are familiar with are the product of someone playing a meticulously planned route over and over again until the execution is almost perfect.
With the more popular games it reaches a point where they are barely even playing the game anymore, instead running on auto-pilot and hoping to make the least mistakes and get the most favorable RNG with minor things like enemy AI patterns.
Speedrunning a game with roguelike randomness is a completely different beast, requiring actual mastery of the game as it was intended to be played.
Re: First NetHack bot ascension
#25> the bot has already managed to reach Rodney without farming and can get to the Castle and beyond fairly reliably, maybe 1 in 10 runs or so
so, the bot is also a better player than me.
Re: First NetHack bot ascension
#26At the risk of losing my nerd card, I've never played Nethack. I read the reddit thread, and while it was in English, it made not a lick of sense to me. Now I know how non-engineers feel sometimes. :) BTW, can someone tell me why this is such an amazing accomplishment? I know Nethack is very old, so is this a case of a complex problem space or just no one has tried before?
It's incredibly complicated. That's probably less of a big thing now than it was in the 80s or 90s. In the 80s or 90s it was just amazing that a game could be that intricate. The sigil-based graphics are part of what make the complexity possible. And - the dev team have coded in all manner of combinations of things, many of which get you killed in plausible/amusing/annoying/complicated ways. There's a culture of play…
> The sigil-based graphics are part of what make the complexity possible
I don't think that is relevant, I have played the GUI version for many years, and it's perfectly usable.
Re: First NetHack bot ascension
#27At the risk of losing my nerd card, I've never played Nethack. I read the reddit thread, and while it was in English, it made not a lick of sense to me. Now I know how non-engineers feel sometimes. :) BTW, can someone tell me why this is such an amazing accomplishment? I know Nethack is very old, so is this a case of a complex problem space or just no one has tried before?
Nethack is a very complex game, and takes a very long time to understand enough to ascend (beat the game). Think of it like dungeons and dragons on crack, with endless possibilities and variables. The fact that someone wrote a bot to think on its feet enough to do this, is astonishing. You should try it out in your free time, check out alt.org, there's a server where you can play and the irc channel #nethack on freen…
Probably D&D with a human dungeon master would allow more possible actions, in the sense that NetHack only allows (a)pply, (C)all, (d)rop, (e)at, (E)ngrave, (f)ire, (P)ut on, (q)uaff, (Q)uiver, (r)ead, (t)hrow, (w)ield, (W)ear, (z)ap, #dip, #invoke, #name, #offer, and #rub actions with specific items in your main inventory (and most of those actions won't be applicable to most items most of the time). A human DM might allow many more verbs, like stacking things on top of one another, repairing items in a nonmagical way, building new devices or modifying the functionality of existing devices in a nonmagical way, pouring a liquid onto a specific object or dungeon feature (including one that can't be picked up), and a lot more.
I agree that the bot ascension is an astonishing achievement, and one I didn't expect to see for many years!
Re: First NetHack bot ascension
#28You can watch players (and bots) play NetHack in real time:
telnet nethack.alt.org
If you want to start playing, telnet there, create an account, hit "p" to play a game and then "?" to read basic help. http://nethack.alt.org/ will keep logs of your game as well as other stats.
This post also mentions previous bot attempts such as the Tactical Amulet Extraction Bot (TAEB), which is also worth looking at: http://taeb.github.io/
Warning, SPOILERS: If you're okay with spoiling the game to some extent (e.g., solutions to common puzzles, which corpses are safe to eat, strategies), check out the NetHackWiki: http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page
Re: First NetHack bot ascension
#29One of the difficulties for a human playing Nethack is remembering all the potions and amulets and wands and scrolls and rings and monsters and their effects and many, many, many combinations. In a way a bot should have an easier time since it has basically unlimited memory.
Re: First NetHack bot ascension
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nethack is fiendish, and you only have a single life. The dungeon is procedurally generated. There are techniques to ascending but it's hard even for people to do, let alone programming a bot. You get potions, scrolls, weapons etc but have no clue what they are until you use them (some scrolls will help you identify what other things are in advance). Nothing about them will give you any clue (scrolls have names like…
There are lots of advanced techniques for identifying things. If you have a pink potion you can throw it at a monster, and based on the monster's reaction you might now know what pink potions are. Most of this stuff would be hard to learn on your own though.
You can also identify rings by dropping them down wells—different rings fall down (or don't fall down) the wells in different ways—and identify wands by writing on the ground with them. Definitely hard to pick up any of that on your own, though.