Beating the frontier on NetHack
Antithesis, a computer game company, started when its founder Dave suggested creating a simulator for everything, but then they decided to build a smarter fuzzer for NetHack. The game is notoriously difficult because of permadeath, extreme information scarcity, and brutal intolerance for error. NetHack's complexity inspired Antithesis to develop deterministic hypervisors, visualization techniques, and skip tree data structures.
The team aimed to create an AI agent capable of reliably and quickly beating NetHack within 5 wall-clock minutes on nearly 80% of the game's seeds. They achieved this by treating the tool as a probabilistic programming language, enabling capable AI agents to find paths to victory in near real-time.
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