NetHack C-to-JS porting contest: 8 superhuman coding agent swarms top 99% but none hits 100%
davidbau · x · 2026-10-26
Professor David Bau launched the Teleport Contest: bit-exactly port the 46-year-old open-source roguelike NetHack 5.0 (442,901 lines of C and Lua) to readable JavaScript, matching the original's 80×24 tty output on every keystroke.
- Any approach allowed — LLM agent swarms, hand-coded JS, a C-to-JS transpiler, or hybrids; fork the teleport-contest repo and every push is scored automatically
- 44 ground-truth gameplay sessions are provided for testing; official scoring also uses secret held-out sessions, with 22,000 points available through November
- Phase 1 freezes Nov 29, 2026; Phase 2 in December reveals a new goal and penalizes code changes chasing it, so maintainable ports win and overfit ones get crushed
- Bau spent four months porting NetHack with AI agent swarms: eight strong superhuman coding swarms pass 80% on tests, some over 99%, but none reaches 100% — showing how hard an easily-verifiable task remains
Related event: NetHack Porting Challenge Ends with No Perfect Score from AI Agents(3 posts)→
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