What should we do about pre-seeded games?

[aoeixsz4]

The prime offenders being nht's 235 turn AceHack ascension and their 363 turn unnethack asc (as unnht). At least with the unnethack game, the seed is shown in the dumplog, allowing us to track which games are pre-seeded, though the current infrastructure does not look at dumplog information, only xlogfile. See https://ascension.run/history/unn/users/unnht/dumps/eu/unnht.1429442870.txt.html The AceHack game however, does not show any seed info in the dumplog.

[RojjaCebolla]

i feel like acehack is effectively historical/defunct, both it and nitrohack were abandoned and essentially replaced by NH4. it seems like the only cheaty run is NHT's superspeed run - why not simply exclude that one manually? in other variants that allow seeding, the games are already unscored.

old conversations:

• https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Random_number_generator#Misuse
• https://old.reddit.com/r/nethack/comments/3355z6/363_turn_16_second_set_seed_unnethack_win/
• https://old.reddit.com/r/nethack/comments/31ifi4/prelude_to_an_unnethack_speedrun_set_seed_gametime/cq27bfn/

[aoeixsz4]

Yeah true. I'm still sorta undecided about what to do with the record because I don't want to remove it entirely, but as you mentioned on IRC we could have a separate category/page somewhere on the scoreboard site for cool stuff ppl done with preseeded games...

[RojjaCebolla]

there could be a "historically interesting games" page? and they don't all necessarily need to be ones where some form of exploit happened, it could include things like some of the stuff from https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Notable_Players

But at least there'd be a place for interesting games that shouldn't be scored, and/or games that caused the devteam to fix a critical flaw/vulnerability.