Currently, it is going better than expected - I am leading both the lowest scored ascension, and the best behaved (most conducts) ascension trophies. Neither are competitions I expected to do well at: I had managed a few conducts individually before, but never so many in one game; and my previous lowest score game on NAO was in the 600,000s. I don't expect I will stay ahead in either competition long — there are players who specialise in both disciplines who just haven't got their games on the board yet. So I'm just enjoying the 15 minutes of fame here :-)
For the uninitiated: ascending (completing) nethack with a low score is much harder than winning with a high score, since, by the time you are in a position to complete the game, killing most monsters is easy and every kill counts to your score. To finish with a low score, I played nearly-pacifist for the last 20k turns. Conducts are where you beat the game under self-imposed additional restrictions; for my 7-conduct game, I managed to play vegan, genoless, wishless and polyless.
Update: Before I even finish my post, the mighty Tenaya has come along and completed a pacifist game, knocking me off of the leaderboard for the low score ascension (by a factor of 10). And equalling my 7 conducts (although I still have the moral lead in that one, I think, since Tenaya would have had to start-scum to play pacifist, whereas my game was a straight game — my only monk of the tournament so far — with only normal good fortune).
