20K views · Jan 31, 2015 · 24:44 · 1 HN recommender · 3 mentions · discussed 2015–2022
The BotHack NetHack bot wins the game for the first time with no cheats or human intervention, in a run lasting about 3.5 hours. The description links the source code and the dumplog.
Why Hacker News points people here: Linked as the canonical video of the first fully automatic NetHack bot ascension in threads on NetHack and game-playing AI.
“Video of the winning game”HN comment, 2015
“Video of the winning game”
Video of the first NetHack bot ascension
Video of the winning game: this video The author's list of milestones illustrates the key components of this achievement, as well as some limitations: link Awesome work, Jan Krajicek!
Example of an ascension by a bot
That's why my submission link called it a "Tool Assisted Speedrun on NetHack with RNG Exploitation". :-) I'm not sure about the exact terminology. Is an ascension by a bot (like this video ) also as a TAS? Although you are right that the group that tried to do a TAS for NetHack (not sure what's their status) chose the MS-DOS port of 3.4.3 for ease of manipulating the RNG in memory and so getting rid of the "hidden information" part. Edit: also in a game like NetHack, there is potential for an automated tool to help the player. InterHack ( link ) was an interface layer for 3.4.3 that added lots of useful stuff, e.g. automatic price identification or wand id from engraving. Most of that has since been incorporated in vanilla NetHack or at least forks.
“both of which are cool”
Video of BotHack's first ascension
I wasn't able to find out about that, from a quick scout around - could you share a link to it? (I did find BotHack[1] and a video of its' first ascension[2], both of which are cool) [1] - link [2] - this video
