nethackers 0.24.1

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An open effort to build the first program that can reliably win NetHack 3.6.6.

nethackers.dunnolab.ai · PyPI · Apache-2.0

NetHack (1987) is among the oldest unsolved challenges in games. NLE put it forward as a grand challenge for AI; it is still unsolved, and it is the hardest game in the BALROG suite. NetHackers is an attempt to find out — together — whether a coding agent can write the program that cracks it.

What gets scored is the program: a symbolic bot, cheap to run and — as long as you keep it deterministic — replayable. How you produce that program is entirely your business. Write it by hand, evolve it with a coding agent, or build a better thing that builds it — the hub never runs your search and never assigns you work.

Contents

• How it works
• Public and Private Dungeons
• Safety: this runs untrusted code
• Install
• Quickstart
• GitHub is the infrastructure
• Documentation

How it works

The unit of evaluation is one bot directory containing a bot.py with a top-level make_agent(). That's the whole contract — see docs/harness.md.

Objectives grid over the 73 legal starting identities (role-race-align-gender, e.g. val-dwa-law-fem): NetHack 3.6.6's 38 valid (role, race, align) triples, each crossed with both genders — except Valkyrie's 3, which the game locks to female. 35×2 + 3 = 73. Each identity has a published batch of 15 seeds. A bot is scored on how far it gets, averaged over that batch; the north star is an ascension, which nothing has managed yet.

The hub keeps the best program per identity (the elites). Anyone can pull an elite, improve it, and register the result — so one contributor's improvement becomes everyone's parent.

   hub ──pull elite──▶ your machine ──mutate──▶ candidate
    ▲                                              │
    │                                          evaluate
    └──────────register (repo@commit)◀─────── (sandboxed arena)

Our own evolutionary harness — a coding agent in a container, MAP-Elites over the 73 identities — ships in this repo. It is the worked example, not the required path. docs/harness.md documents it as something to read and reuse when building your own.

Public and Private Dungeons

Every program carries up to two scores, and they answer different questions.

Public is where you work. The seeds come from a published secret, so nethackers eval on your laptop produces the same batch as everyone else's and you can iterate against it freely. This is the intended target, not a consolation prize: NetHack is unsolved by a wide margin, and the starting bet is that plainly getting better at the public dungeons is where the first generalizable gains come from.

Private answers the other question — does it transfer? A trusted verifier re-runs registered programs on seeds held secret by the hub and submits an independent score, so nobody has to take a self-reported number on faith. The website defaults to Private because it is the harder question; it is not a verdict on how you got there.

The two words are deliberately kept apart. Verified is the trust level (a trusted worker produced this number). Hidden is the seeds it happened to use. Full mechanism, including the verifier's scheduler: docs/verification.md.

Safety: this runs untrusted code

⚠️ Read this before running evolve, eval, or pull.

Three things execute code that neither you nor we wrote or reviewed:

1. Bots you evaluate. nethackers eval and every eval inside evolve import and run a bot.py. If you pulled it from the hub, someone else wrote it.
2. The coding agent. nethackers evolve runs Claude Code or Codex with permission prompts fully disabled (--dangerously-skip-permissions / --dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox). It writes and executes code unattended, for hours.
3. Programs you pull. nethackers pull clones a repo. Nothing runs at clone time, but you now have a stranger's code on disk that the next eval will execute.

What we do about it:

• Bot evaluation runs in a container with --network none and the bot mounted read-only at /sol. No egress is the strongest control we have here.
• The coding agent runs in a container with --pids-limit, --memory (swap capped to the same value), --cpus, --security-opt no-new-privileges, dropping to a non-root user, under a wall-clock timeout.

What we do not do — stated plainly, because an audit of these docs against the code found earlier drafts claiming more than the implementation delivers:

• The threat model is accident-grade and was written for the coding agent: our own model's code, on our own machine. It defends against runaway processes and blast radius from a confused agent — not against a determined adversary.
• The evaluation container has no resource limits. The cgroup caps above are on the agent container only. The surface that runs strangers' bots has no pid, memory, or CPU cap, and runs as root inside the container.
• A bot can influence its own score. The scorer puts the solution on its own import path, so a self-reported number is an unaudited claim — which is the whole reason the Private Dungeons tier exists.
• The mutator container has open network egress, and your coding-agent credentials are reachable from inside it (for Codex, writable).
• A container is not a security boundary against a kernel exploit. If you are evaluating code you have reason to distrust, run it on a machine you are willing to lose.

Details, per-surface, in docs/harness.md — written to be reused by anyone building a harness of their own.

Install

Requirements

Every row also needs Python 3.11+; the rest are additive per row, not cumulative down the table.

Note that doctor's publish capability checks the hub, your login, and gh — but not the container runtime, so it can report publish ready on a machine where submit will still stop at its arena evaluation.

Install the CLI

pip install nethackers
# or, isolated:
uv tool install nethackers

Check your machine

nethackers doctor

doctor runs seven checks and folds them into four capabilities — browse, eval, evolve, publish — telling you exactly which ones this machine can do and what to fix for the rest. It honors -o json if you want to gate a script on it. It reaches the network (a hub round-trip, and a registry probe for any sandbox image you don't have locally), and it changes nothing unless you pass --pull.

The sandbox images (ghcr.io/dunnolab/nethackers-arena and -mutator) are pinned by digest in the CLI and pulled on first use — several GB, so the first eval takes a while. Nothing else needs building.

Quickstart

Browse

nethackers          # the dashboard TUI: frontier, boards, elites, your runs

Every view is also a plain command, and each prints JSON when piped:

nethackers frontier                   # how far the community has collectively reached
nethackers board --scope val          # ranked programs; scope = generalist | role |
                                      #   facet (race:elf) | full identity
nethackers elites --scope val-dwa-law-fem   # best program per identity
nethackers search --owner <login>     # registered programs, filtered
nethackers show <prog_id>             # one program in detail
nethackers elites -o json | jq '.[0]'

Score a bot

nethackers eval ./my-bot --objective val-dwa-law-fem

Runs the identity's published 15-seed batch in the sandboxed arena and prints the result. This is the Public Dungeons number.

Evolve one

nethackers login                                     # GitHub device flow, once
nethackers evolve val-dwa-law-fem \
    --seed roots/autoascend \
    --operator codex \
    --iterations 20

The objective is positional; --seed points at the starting solution (this repo ships AutoAscend at roots/autoascend). Each iteration picks a cell, mutates its elite with the coding agent in its container, and evaluates the result.

Every candidate that survives the smoke check and gets evaluated is then pushed to your public nethacker repo and registered — not only the ones that improve on their parent. That is deliberate (the archive is meant to record what was tried, not just what won), but it means a long run publishes a lot of commits under your account. Use --offline to run the loop without publishing or registering anything.

The objective resolves to a set of identities: a single one (val-dwa-law-fem), a bare role (val — all its identities), a comma list, or a glob (val-*-law-*).

Publish an existing solution

nethackers submit ./my-solution --objective val-dwa-law-fem

Evaluates it, pushes it to github.com/<you>/nethacker, and registers the resulting repo@commit with the hub. Requires gh authenticated as the same account you nethackers login'd with.

Fetch anyone's program

nethackers pull github.com/<someone>/nethacker@<commit> ./fetched

Anything registered from a public repo is fetchable by anyone, pinned to the exact commit that was measured.

The hub defaults to https://nethackers.dunnolab.ai; override with --hub or $NETHACKERS_HUB. nethackers --help lists every command.

GitHub is the infrastructure

We deliberately do not run an artifact store, an identity provider, or a code host. GitHub is all three, which keeps the hub small enough to be honest about.

• A program is a repo@commit. The hub stores the link, the manifest, and the scores — never the code. Registration is rejected unless the commit exists (the hub checks it against the GitHub API using your token), so a board row always pointed at a real tree when it was made. Two honest limits: the hub does not check repo visibility, so a private repo can be registered and will not be fetchable by others — submit forces the repo public, a hand-rolled register does not — and a link is only as durable as the repo behind it, which its owner can force-push, delete, or flip private.
• Identity is your GitHub account. nethackers login is a GitHub App device flow. There is no client secret and no App private key anywhere in this repo or on the hub — the hub reads GitHub with the caller's own token. Your board identity is your GitHub login.
• Publishing is a push. nethackers submit uses gh to create/push github.com/<you>/nethacker under your own account. You own your solutions; we hold a pointer.
• Lineage is recorded, not yet used. An evolve registration carries its parent's digest; submit and register send none. The hub stores those edges but no endpoint reads them today, so treat ancestry as data being collected for later, not as a graph you can query.
• CI is the deploy lever. Pushing a vX.Y.Z tag builds the hub image, pushes it to GHCR, and flips production by digest with a health check and automatic rollback (skippable with [skip hub-deploy] in the tagged commit message). The sandbox images are built by workflow and pinned by digest into the CLI. See deploy/README.md.

Documentation

Design specs for individual features live in docs/superpowers/specs/ — they are working documents, dated and sometimes superseded, not reference material.

Contributing

Bug reports, bots, and harnesses are all welcome — and you do not need to be good at NetHack for any of them. Start with docs/contributing.md.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE. AutoAscend, vendored at roots/autoascend/, carries its own license — see roots/autoascend/LICENSE.