The NetHack Challenge

The NetHack Challenge is a competition at NeurIPS 2021 in which teams compete to build the best agents to play the game of NetHack 3.6.6, using the NetHack Learning Environment (NLE). It runs from June 9th to October 31st 2021, and is organised by AI Researchers from Facebook AI Research, University College London, the University of Oxford, NYU and AIcrowd.

The challenge invites entrants, using any method they choose, to develop agents that can reliably either beat the full game of NetHack or achieve as high a score as possible. No restrictions are placed on how the agent is trained and contestants will use their own hardware. Evaluation will be performed in a controlled setting on AIcrowd who run the competition through their platform.

The competition is designed to offer machine learning students, researchers and NetHack-bot builders the opportunity to participate in a grand challenge in AI - without prohibitive computational costs - and comes with a prize pool of $15,000.