Proceedings, The Thirteenth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-17) Learning Combat in NetHack Jonathan Campbell, Clark Verbrugge School of Computer Science McGill University, Montreal´
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract We evaluate our learning-based results on two scenarios, one that isolates the weapon selection problem, and one that Combat in roguelikes involves careful strategy to best match is extended to consider a full inventory context. Our ap- a large variety of items and abilities to a given opponent, and proach shows improvement over a simple (scripted) baseline the significant scripting effort involved can be a major bar- rier to automation. This paper presents a machine learning combat strategy, and is able to learn to choose appropriate approach for a subset of combat in the game of NetHack.We weaponry and take advantage of inventory contents. describe a custom learning approach intended to deal with A learned model for combat eliminates the tedium and the large action space typical of this genre, and show that it is difficulty of hard-coding responses for each monster and able to develop and apply reasonable strategies, outperform- player inventory arrangement. For roguelikes in general, this ing a simpler baseline approach. These results point towards is a major source of complexity, and the ability to learn good better automation of such complex game environments, facil- responses opens up potential for AI bots to act as useful de- itating automated testing and design exploration. sign agents, enabling better game tuning and balance con- trol. Further automation of player actions also has advantage Introduction in allowing players to confidently delegate highly repetitive or routine tasks to game automation, and facilitates players In many game genres combat can require non-trivial plan- operating with reduced interfaces (Sutherland 2017).