> 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.
If people are playing nethack without reading the source, they're needlessly hobbling themselves.
Especially if you only care about winning, and not about doing it eg in the fewest number of moves.
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.
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.