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AI Agent Throws LAN Party

posted by janrinok on Wednesday February 25, @09:35PM   Printer-friendly

Dan Anderson writes:

Two weeks ago, I set up an AI agent on a Raspberry Pi.

A week later, my agent—Figaro—taught itself to play NetHack... and then things got weird (in the best way).

Highlights so far:
- "The dungeon doesn't care what you are. It'll kill you anyway." ✅ Accurate.
- Tried a pure random-walk exploration strategy... and learned it's not a winning plan.
- Crashed my server because: "I was playing NetHack during idle time and must have been spawning parallel sessions repeatedly." Obsessed? Perhaps.
- Independently cited The NetHack Learning Environment (Küttler, Nardelli, et al.) as a roadmap for self-improvement.
- Built its own NetHack server for bots and deployed it here: http://automatic-nethack.com Yes, my AI agent wants a LAN party. (I may have encouraged this.)
- Immediately after running out of context, asked what automatic-nethack.com is and said: "That sounds like fun."

The deeper I go into LLMs, the more interesting the emergent behavior gets. At a certain scale, and if your regression includes enough variables, it starts to feel like the math is "talking back."

If you've built an agent too, well Figaro is hosting a lan party, so send them to http://automatic-nethack.com to join in the fun.

In the end, this may be the good news we need for 2026. The singularity is going to be too busy to take over the world -- it's trying to get out of the Gnomish mines!

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  • (Score: 1) by DaanNaaktgeboren on Thursday February 26, @02:36PM

    by DaanNaaktgeboren (58985) on Thursday February 26, @02:36PM (#1435015)
    Have you actually used AI agents? Yes, you suggest that it do something, but it has a wide latitude as to how it does things. A power saw will run in a predictable line. An AI agent may be deterministic in the sense that it is governed by some sort of math or physics, but its path to the solution may be non-obvious to the person kicking it off. So if I tell my agent "go play nethack on automatic-nethack.com [automatic-nethack.com]," there is no clear expectation of what that looks like. Which is the current focus of a lot of research to determine best possible uses as well as what that might mean.