Facebook releases AI development tool based on NetHack

Facebook researchers believe the game NetHack is well-tailored to training, testing, and evaluating AI models. To this end, they today released the NetHack Learning Environment, a research tool for benchmarking the robustness and generalization of reinforcement learning agents. For decades, games have served as benchmarks for AI. But things really kicked into gear in 2013 -- the year Google subsidiary DeepMind demonstrated an AI system that could play Pong, Breakout, Space Invaders, Seaquest, Beamrider, Enduro, and Q*bert at superhuman levels. Rather, they're informing the development of systems that might one day diagnose illnesses, predict complicated protein structures, and segment CT scans.