astra playing NetHack: - score: 48,978 - BALROG progress: 49.4% - max dungeon depth: 17 - max experience level: 14 important note: this is a cherry-picked episode (best of 10), and Astra has been able to modify its own game-playing harness no privileged information or unfair game modifications, but it uses tools such as pathfinding to previously visited landmarks and code-written trackers for previously observed entities. these offload a fair amount of low-level reasoning, while Astra remains responsible for choosing what to do at every step imo, the ability of LLMs to autonomously create tools that amortize low-level control costs (and then interpret and use their outputs in-context) is remarkable, and one of the reasons i'm excited about LLM agents. like, we could run the same tool computations and... concatenate the outputs into a flat vector for an MLP... but it would still have to learn what those outputs mean and how to use them. with LLMs we get free hierarchies and natural separation of responsibilities... anyway, i'm now running episodes with the default settings from BALROG for a more fair comparison the auto-research programme continues. will report back! full run below ⤵️

uuuuh guys... Astra is fighting the final boss in the graveyard 👀 i'm putting together a blog post on how we got here (hopefully by then it will have beaten the game 🚀)