"Beat Factorio" means constructing a rocket.

"Figure out how" means roughly that it wasn't hand-held through the process. Roughly, the supervised part of the AI's training process must have been plausible in a world where Factorio didn't exist. (But it's allowed unlimited unsupervised play of Factorio.)

Details:

Examples of things that are okay:

• a human can choose a favorable map seed

• the AI can play Factorio unsupervised for any length of time

• the AI can access the wiki (or other online resources) during its unsupervised play

Examples of things that aren't okay:

• no knowledge of Factorio-in-particular (e.g. recipes, blueprints, "muscle memory") can have been programmed into the AI

• the AI must not have had any supervised training on Factorio specifically (e.g. watching videos of people playing)

• the AI's reward function must not encode any deep knowledge about Factorio specifically (rewarding novelty is fine; rewarding it each time it constructs a new kind of item is... kinda borderline, but I lean not-fine?; rewarding it each time it constructs a new kind of item along the critical path is not fine)

Every January, I'll check whether there's any credible claim that somebody's done anything-like-this; if so, I'll dig in to see if it meets my "figuring out" criteria; if so, I'll resolve this market YES. Otherwise, on 2030-01-01, I'll resolve it NO.

• Update 2025-03-05 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Factorio Version Update

  • Any version is acceptable: The experiment may be conducted using any version of Factorio.

• Update 2025-05-05 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): * Factorio-related data included in the AI's training set due to broad web scraping is acceptable.

  • Specialized post-training or fine-tuning specifically for Factorio is not acceptable.

  • The guiding principle is that the AI was not intentionally designed or fine-tuned to be proficient at Factorio.