NetHackers

NetHackers is an open research project aimed at creating an AI program capable of reliably winning NetHack 3.6.6, a notoriously difficult roguelike game. Participants can write bots by hand, use AI coding tools to improve them, or build custom harnesses. The platform uses GitHub as both a social and storage layer, allowing developers to share bots, run local experiments, and register results linked to their repositories.

The project supports 73 different starting character identities, so bots don't need to excel at everything to contribute. An evolutionary optimization loop helps newcomers get started within minutes. Builders can integrate their own search algorithms and evaluation methods, with public seeds available for testing and hidden seeds for validating real improvements.