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Comment by octernion | Hacker News Reader

this seems like the plot of "edge of tomorrow," [1] but in nethack form.

so neat -- i love that the RNG space fits into 100GB (all nethack games that ever will be).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_Tomorrow

The original article points out that it's all possible "Tou Hum Fem Neu" (female neutral human tourists). You have lots of other choices when you start a NetHack game. :-)

oh gosh, i didn't realize that. looks like there are around 38 combinations; i wonder what the table space looks like for the other ones!

In theory there should be 2³² possibilities for each although it might be trickier for a player to notice which one he or she is in.

The other thing is that two instances of the same game diverge quickly when the player doesn't take exactly the same actions, because monster generation and dungeon level generation will use the current state of the RNG. So although the RNG will produce the same series of values, the millionth RNG value for one player might be used for the success probability of the player's attempt to hit a kobold, and for another player might be used for some aspect of generating a new dungeon level.

The problem with the other classes is that their starting equipment is less random, so it's more difficult to figure out which seed you are on. You would have to include more of the generated map in the database to figure out which seed you are on.

And of course this would all be shot to hell if Nethack went to a 64 bit seed.

yeah, i wonder how much of the game information you would have to include to make it unique.

that being said, wouldn't map information be sufficient for the remainder of the classes? so using starting equipment is really just an optimization available for this class?

The problem with using the map is that you can't see most of it when you first load the game. So you have to play more (and build up more state) before you get to a completely unique solution. Being able to use the starting equipment makes it much simpler.

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