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Is it actually possible to beat Nethack without reading up some "spoilers" upfront? I've never heard of anybody who managed to do that. Even when you read up a

Is it actually possible to beat Nethack without reading up some "spoilers" upfront? I've never heard of anybody who managed to do that. Even when you read up all kinds of info about the game before you attempt a run it's extremely hard to reach higher levels, yet beat the game. (I myself never reached any later levels despite I know some tricks by now. Tricks impossible to infer from just playing the game; you need to read them up…) Imho there is no winning strategy for Nethack. It's some random stuff "you need to know" to progress even a little bit paired with complete rule of the dice while encountering maximally nonsensical "puzzles". But OK, maybe I'm just too dumb for this game and don't see the "logic" behind the things the game presents.

bubblyworld 3y ago
I'm not sure. I've beaten it a number of times, but only using tons of spoilers as you say. That said, there are players who consistently win almost every game, which is crazy (there's an online nethack server somewhere, can't remember the name offhand, but you can search player stats and some of them are insane). Edit: here's one, a player with a 60% win rate, not as crazy as I initially thought but if you've ever played nethack... https://alt.org/nethack/player-stats.php?player=Stroller https://alt.org/nethack/player-stats.php?player=Stroller
- still_grokking 3y ago
  Of course one can beat Nethack. Many people did. That's not the point. The question was more: Without "spoilers" (a.k.a. "hardcoded heuristics and goals")? (I never made progress because I didn't try hard enough. It became very boring after finding out that this game is random and quite nonsensical, and one can't come up with some strategy only by playing it often enough. I'm in general not enjoying dice games. I prefer games where you can come up with some winning strategy by curious observation and logical thinking.) Because of the nature of Nethack I don't think it's a good AI test as such. Maybe it would be if one let the AI read spoilers / walkthoughs and than let it try playing. Such a test could than maybe probe for the AI's text comprehension, and the ability to map the gained understanding to concrete actions. But just letting it play Nethack unprepared does not give any insides into the AI's capabilities, imho. It will just fail over and over again. Because it's (imho) impossible to beat Nethack without spoilers. You just can't extract the needed knowledge from playing. Even from playing it millions of times.
  - bubblyworld 3y ago
    Relax, friend, I understand your question =) I'm just pointing out that it's not as random as you think. Mechanics in NetHack are quite predictable for the most part, but they are difficult to _discover_ without dying. Given that AIs can play hundreds of thousands of runs in the time it would take me to play one, I'm a bit more optimistic that they could learn the mechanics eventually. I think the fundamental problem is that nobody knows how to do exploration-based reward functions effectively. Has Pitfall been solved by modern RL, for instance? As far as I know that's still an open problem (alongside getting to diamonds in minecraft without hardcoded heuristics, and other things along the same line). (edit: just in terms of evidence for the first claim, once I'd done a run successfully with spoilers I was able to beat the game again without looking anything up. So I think it's more a discovery problem than nethack being inherently random)
    - still_grokking 3y ago
      I think my wording was bad. There are two kinds of "randomness" here at play and I didn't differentiate properly. For me the game mechanics as such are "random". Because you can't discover them by just playing (imho). At the same time the game is ruled by a dice. (So even the best players will fail almost 50% of the time which is almost as random as tossing a coin, and strictly not skill based). > Given that AIs can play hundreds of thousands of runs in the time it would take me to play one, I'm a bit more optimistic that they could learn the mechanics eventually. My gut feeling says the opposite. How do you infer any kind of rules from almost random events? Especially if the "logic" behind the "non random" parts is actually also quite made up and arbitrary (so in a sense also "random", even to people with reason). An "exploration-based reward function" wouldn't be enough. Because this would assume that exploration has (more or less) deterministic outcomes. But given the dice in Nethack it actually does not! You can do "everything right" and still die in almost 50% of the cases. How to infer any meaningful "world model" from such events? Imho you can't. (I can confirm that looking up spoilers will let you make progress in Nethack. That's why I think it's boring. I've tried hundred of times prior to looking up spoilers and didn't make any progress. But after biting the bullet and starting reading some walkthough it was actually quite easy to reach some deeper levels. Until I've hit the next invisible wall. Which would require again some out-of-band knowledge… I know that reading the next spoilers would also make this wall go away. But I've lost any interest in this game after finding out exactly this: It's impossible to play without a walkthough; and with a full walkthough it's actually considerably easy, and comes down to "just having luck". At this point I could just toss a coin to determine whether "I won". That's maximally boring. I don't like dice games; and the exploration part in Nethack leads nowhere because the world is arbitrarily made up. You can't discover the mechanics without already knowing them…)
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  No doubt that person is very good at nethack, but even among very good players 60% win rate is survivorship bias.
codetrotter 3y ago
> Imho there is no winning strategy for Nethack. It's some random stuff "you need to know" to progress even a little bit paired with complete rule of the dice while encountering maximally nonsensical "puzzles". In the training data for the LLMs there is probably a significant of information about Nethack already, I would think. So with the right prompt perhaps it could play better than some people, if those people did not have any info about nethack and had not played it before.
klyrs 3y ago
> Is it actually possible to beat Nethack without reading up some "spoilers" upfront? If people are playing nethack without reading the source, they're needlessly hobbling themselves.
- still_grokking 3y ago
  That's my point. Imho it's impossible to even come close to a realistic chance to beat this game without knowing more or less every detail of its internal mechanics. And you can't infer this knowledge just from playing. You need to look it up from some out-of-band source. So only letting an AI play this game will not reveal anything about the "reasoning" capabilities of said AI. Letting the AI read the source (or some other "spoilers") and than look at how it performs playing would be maybe a usable test. But that's still a big "Maybe" imho as Nethack is just "too random" I think.
  - klyrs 3y ago
    > And you can't infer this knowledge just from playing. You need to look it up from some out-of-band source. I disagree with this in principle. Given enough time, you can collect enough statistics to infer pretty much anything about the game. I've participated in efforts to reverse-engineer web-only games where neither source nor binary were available -- the server does all the compute and the client only receives information to show the user. But in practice: how long will it take to first inscribe elbereth, and then notice its effect? Yeah, probably not happening in a few of my lifetimes.
- eru 3y ago
  Human readable spoilers are enough, no need to dive into the C source. People have already extracted most of the information and tables you need. Especially if you only care about winning, and not about doing it eg in the fewest number of moves.

bubblyworld 3y ago

I'm not sure. I've beaten it a number of times, but only using tons of spoilers as you say. That said, there are players who consistently win almost every game, which is crazy (there's an online nethack server somewhere, can't remember the name offhand, but you can search player stats and some of them are insane). Edit: here's one, a player with a 60% win rate, not as crazy as I initially thought but if you've ever played nethack... https://alt.org/nethack/player-stats.php?player=Stroller https://alt.org/nethack/player-stats.php?player=Stroller

still_grokking 3y ago
Of course one can beat Nethack. Many people did. That's not the point. The question was more: Without "spoilers" (a.k.a. "hardcoded heuristics and goals")? (I never made progress because I didn't try hard enough. It became very boring after finding out that this game is random and quite nonsensical, and one can't come up with some strategy only by playing it often enough. I'm in general not enjoying dice games. I prefer games where you can come up with some winning strategy by curious observation and logical thinking.) Because of the nature of Nethack I don't think it's a good AI test as such. Maybe it would be if one let the AI read spoilers / walkthoughs and than let it try playing. Such a test could than maybe probe for the AI's text comprehension, and the ability to map the gained understanding to concrete actions. But just letting it play Nethack unprepared does not give any insides into the AI's capabilities, imho. It will just fail over and over again. Because it's (imho) impossible to beat Nethack without spoilers. You just can't extract the needed knowledge from playing. Even from playing it millions of times.
- bubblyworld 3y ago
  Relax, friend, I understand your question =) I'm just pointing out that it's not as random as you think. Mechanics in NetHack are quite predictable for the most part, but they are difficult to _discover_ without dying. Given that AIs can play hundreds of thousands of runs in the time it would take me to play one, I'm a bit more optimistic that they could learn the mechanics eventually. I think the fundamental problem is that nobody knows how to do exploration-based reward functions effectively. Has Pitfall been solved by modern RL, for instance? As far as I know that's still an open problem (alongside getting to diamonds in minecraft without hardcoded heuristics, and other things along the same line). (edit: just in terms of evidence for the first claim, once I'd done a run successfully with spoilers I was able to beat the game again without looking anything up. So I think it's more a discovery problem than nethack being inherently random)
  - still_grokking 3y ago
    I think my wording was bad. There are two kinds of "randomness" here at play and I didn't differentiate properly. For me the game mechanics as such are "random". Because you can't discover them by just playing (imho). At the same time the game is ruled by a dice. (So even the best players will fail almost 50% of the time which is almost as random as tossing a coin, and strictly not skill based). > Given that AIs can play hundreds of thousands of runs in the time it would take me to play one, I'm a bit more optimistic that they could learn the mechanics eventually. My gut feeling says the opposite. How do you infer any kind of rules from almost random events? Especially if the "logic" behind the "non random" parts is actually also quite made up and arbitrary (so in a sense also "random", even to people with reason). An "exploration-based reward function" wouldn't be enough. Because this would assume that exploration has (more or less) deterministic outcomes. But given the dice in Nethack it actually does not! You can do "everything right" and still die in almost 50% of the cases. How to infer any meaningful "world model" from such events? Imho you can't. (I can confirm that looking up spoilers will let you make progress in Nethack. That's why I think it's boring. I've tried hundred of times prior to looking up spoilers and didn't make any progress. But after biting the bullet and starting reading some walkthough it was actually quite easy to reach some deeper levels. Until I've hit the next invisible wall. Which would require again some out-of-band knowledge… I know that reading the next spoilers would also make this wall go away. But I've lost any interest in this game after finding out exactly this: It's impossible to play without a walkthough; and with a full walkthough it's actually considerably easy, and comes down to "just having luck". At this point I could just toss a coin to determine whether "I won". That's maximally boring. I don't like dice games; and the exploration part in Nethack leads nowhere because the world is arbitrarily made up. You can't discover the mechanics without already knowing them…)
CuriouslyC 3y ago
No doubt that person is very good at nethack, but even among very good players 60% win rate is survivorship bias.

codetrotter 3y ago

> Imho there is no winning strategy for Nethack. It's some random stuff "you need to know" to progress even a little bit paired with complete rule of the dice while encountering maximally nonsensical "puzzles". In the training data for the LLMs there is probably a significant of information about Nethack already, I would think. So with the right prompt perhaps it could play better than some people, if those people did not have any info about nethack and had not played it before.

klyrs 3y ago

> Is it actually possible to beat Nethack without reading up some "spoilers" upfront? If people are playing nethack without reading the source, they're needlessly hobbling themselves.

still_grokking 3y ago
That's my point. Imho it's impossible to even come close to a realistic chance to beat this game without knowing more or less every detail of its internal mechanics. And you can't infer this knowledge just from playing. You need to look it up from some out-of-band source. So only letting an AI play this game will not reveal anything about the "reasoning" capabilities of said AI. Letting the AI read the source (or some other "spoilers") and than look at how it performs playing would be maybe a usable test. But that's still a big "Maybe" imho as Nethack is just "too random" I think.
- klyrs 3y ago
  > And you can't infer this knowledge just from playing. You need to look it up from some out-of-band source. I disagree with this in principle. Given enough time, you can collect enough statistics to infer pretty much anything about the game. I've participated in efforts to reverse-engineer web-only games where neither source nor binary were available -- the server does all the compute and the client only receives information to show the user. But in practice: how long will it take to first inscribe elbereth, and then notice its effect? Yeah, probably not happening in a few of my lifetimes.
eru 3y ago
Human readable spoilers are enough, no need to dive into the C source. People have already extracted most of the information and tables you need. Especially if you only care about winning, and not about doing it eg in the fewest number of moves.