4 ms·

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

• 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.