NAIL: A General Interactive Fiction Agent

TL;DR

NAIL is an autonomous agent designed for parser-based Interactive Fiction games, demonstrating strong generalization and winning the 2018 Text Adventure AI Competition across twenty unseen games.

Contribution

The paper introduces NAIL, a novel general-purpose AI agent for parser-based IF games, with architecture and insights that enable competitive performance on unseen games.

Findings

NAIL won the 2018 Text Adventure AI Competition

NAIL successfully played twenty unseen IF games

The architecture enables generalization to new games

Abstract

Interactive Fiction (IF) games are complex textual decision making problems. This paper introduces NAIL, an autonomous agent for general parser-based IF games. NAIL won the 2018 Text Adventure AI Competition, where it was evaluated on twenty unseen games. This paper describes the architecture, development, and insights underpinning NAIL's performance.