Setup of TAEB on openSUSE 11.1

TAEB stands for Tactical Amulet Extraction Bot. It is a framework written Perl. This framework enables one to make a bot that can play nethack. I'm interested in TAEB because I want to try to reduce its runtime footprint and experiment with bots that use search based AI and rules based AI. In the recent 2009 Mario AI contest, preliminary results showed that A* search implementations were beating the rules based implementations. I found this suprising because I thought rules based AI would be more flexible and faster.

I intend to do these same types of experiments with TAEB.

First step was to get nethack installed. nethack was available at www.nethack.org. OpenSUSE 11.1's current repositories alos had nethack available, so I just installed it with the OpenSUSE software installer.

I downloaded the latest TAEB using git. git clone git://github.com/sartak/TAEB.git

I discovered that if I attempted to install TAEB using sudo: sudo perl Makefile.PL
For some reason, the Perl function can_run can't find my installation of nethack. This was odd. It was necessary to create a symbolic link /usr/bin/nethack to /usr/games/nethack.

After making the symbolic link to the nethack executable, there were a number of warnings about additional Perl modules not found on the system:




I went back to eliminate each of these warnings. Unless specified otherwise, I used the cpan executable to eliminate these warnings.

Note, I found that Yaml::Scyk had to be installed but Makefile.PL did not detect and list that it was needed; When I ran taeb the first time, it complaed that it couldn't find the file YAML/Syck.pm.

After YAML::Syck was installed, I rebuilt and reinstalled. Seems to be working!