NetHackers community opens: goal is a machine victory in NetHack

The dunnolab team, led by Vladislav Kurenkov (AIRI), has opened the NetHackers community to create the first program that can consistently win NetHack 3.6.6 — a 1987 game with permadeath.

Compiled by Sergey KostenchukPublished 2026-09-25Updated 2026-09-25

2026-09-25 Research Anthropic

🤖 NetHackers community opens: goal is a machine victory in NetHack

The dunnolab team, led by Vladislav Kurenkov (AIRI), is looking for the first program that can consistently win NetHack 3.6.6: victory is possible only by passing through ~50 procedural levels to the Amulet of Yendor with permadeath. Bots are evaluated by the nethackers CLI on a grid of 73 starting identities: 15 seeds are public, and 15 hidden seeds are recalculated by the organizers.

🌍 This is a fair test of the agentic coding pattern — “the model writes a program that solves the task”: the check is done on hidden seeds, not on self-reported results — there have been no machine victories in NetHack yet.

👤 The barrier to entry is low: nethackers setup installs the runtime and sandbox (~1 GB), bot evolution via Codex or Claude Code is launched with a single command, and other people’s programs can be downloaded by exact commit and improved.

Source 1: https://nethackers.dunnolab.ai/ Source 2: https://github.com/dunnolab/nethackers

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