Epistemic Status: True story

The plan is that this post will begin the sequence Zbybpu’f Nezl.

In college I once took a class called Rational Choice. Because obviously.

Each week we got the rules for, played and discussed a game. It was awesome.

For the grand finale, and to determine the winner of the prestigious Golden Shark Award for best overall performance, we submitted computer program architectures (we’d tell the professor what our program did, within reason, and he’d code it for us) to play The Darwin Game.

The Darwin Game is a variation slash extension of the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. It works like this:

For the first round, each player gets 100 copies of their program in the pool, and the pool pairs those programs at random. You can and often will play against yourself.

Each pair now plays an iterated prisoner’s dilemma variation, as follows. Each turn, each player simultaneously submits a number from 0 to 5. If the two numbers add up to 5 or less, both players earn points equal to their number. If the two numbers add up to 6 or more, neither player gets points. This game then lasts for a large but unknown number of turns, so no one knows when the game is about to end; for us this turned out to be 102 turns.

Each pairing is independent of every other pairing. You do not know what round of the game it is, whether you are facing a copy of yourself, or any history of the game to this point. Your decision algorithm does the same thing each pairing.

At the end of the round, all of the points scored by all of your copies are combined. Your percentage of all the points scored by all programs becomes the percentage of the pool your program gets in the next round. So if you score 10% more points, you get 10% more copies next round, and over time successful programs will displace less successful programs. Hence the name, The Darwin Game.

Your goal is to have as many copies in the pool at the end of the 200th round as possible, or failing that, to survive as many rounds as possible with at least one copy.

If both players coordinate to split the pot, they will score 2.5 per round.

To create some common terminology for discussions, ‘attack’ or means to submit 3 (or a higher number) more than half the time against an opponent willing to not do that, and to ‘fold’ or ‘surrender’ is to submit 2 (or a lower number) more than half the time, with ‘full surrender’ being to alwa...

mutusfa

mutusfa

Some food for thoughts about climate.

mutusfa

mutusfa

Some food for thoughts about climate.