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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Has anybody ever beat NetHack without patching the source code or running it in the debugger?

Beating Nethack is actually not that hard, once you've played it for a decade or two. It starts to get hard when you try to ascend while adopting a conduct[1] like atheism, pacifism, or vegetarianism. There are also various other roguelikes which are well known to be a lot harder than Nethack.

[1] - http://nethack.wikia.com/wiki/Conduct

Agree. Once you've put in the requisite learning time, ascending with even the more difficult classes is just a matter of time and preparing for the most deadly encounters and RNG outcomes, while avoiding inflicting YASD on yourself.

It's so easy, even a computer can do it [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/nethack/comments/2tluxv/yaap_fullau...

Since I'm not a Go player but am a NetHack player, I got more personal appreciation out of BotHack's achievement from last year than from AlphaGo's victory. That was also something that I hadn't expected to see for years to come; you can see from the bot comparison page

https://taeb.github.io/bots.html

that no other bot had really come anywhere close to ascending before BotHack pulled it off.

It's interesting to see that the winning approach was GOFAI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_artificial_intelligen...

-- that is, the author taught the bot human-level rules and concepts based on human knowledge about the game. It wasn't a deep learning or neural net system; there is specific code about what altars do, how to fight mind flayers, or whatever.

For instance, here's a hard-coded list of corpses to avoid eating.

https://github.com/krajj7/BotHack/blob/master/src/bothack/pl...

I was wondering if such a thing existed.

I remember the original Rog-O-Matic rogue playing bot which goes back to 1981. It was really fun to watch it play. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rog-O-Matic

Of course: http://crpgaddict.blogspot.fr/2013/06/nethack-30-ascended.ht...

The whole blog is very entertaining, and the Nethack articles in particular ( 13 if I'm not mistaken).

Yes, and many who do often write up the story of how they "ascended". (This is where the story is in Nethack, @johnchristopher). Here is one of the best of those stories.

http://garote.bdmonkeys.net/nethack/

Yeah. Maybe three or four times when I was in high school. The beginning of the game is usually hard, then it gets easier when you are strong enough and get the artifact weapon and a good armor. You play until you get to the wizard, and after that the game gets pretty hard and you need to escape fast. The elemental levels are very complex and I've died many times in the last level, almost finishing the game and finding myself throwing my keyboard to the wall...

Of course I've read lots of ascension stories and some spoilers about the game to succeed. It's a fun challenge and very rewarding, when you finally ascend.

Yes it's quite common, but probably requires reading about strategies. (I've never done it.)

There is one known person to have ascended unspoiled.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.games.roguelike....

Dozens of times on 3.4.3, but I've been playing it for decades.

Not once on 3.6. It's way harder.

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