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jimrandomh comments on Pract: A Guessing and Testing Game - Less Wrong
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Comments (42)
What stops players from choosing unguessable sequences, like "each number after the first is the previous number, decrypted with my PGP key"?
For one, because that would give you a score of at least 76. If you guessed correctly but your opponent's set was 'even numbers', you'd still lose. Also, to prove your set you'd have to supply the PGP key in your answer, which would further increase your score. And of course, choosing an unguessable set would make you what is commonly called a "lamer".
So don't guess correctly. Stall by only specifying sequences until your opponent makes 76 guesses in total (all wrong, of course). Then resume normal play, permitting yourself one guess each time the opponent makes one. This seems to be a winning strategy if your opponent makes guesses with nonzero frequency and isn't also using crypto.
Lamer, huh?
If I was your opponent, I would assume letting me make many wrong guesses while you only defined sequences was due to your extremely long set definition. In that case, the only winning move is not to play. But more importantly, why would you bother playing at all? Maybe Gigaknight can find joy in defeating opponents who never stood a chance, but I find it more like taking candy from a baby. Also, you risk being stuck in an infinitely long game if both player choose unguessable sets.
The game is broken, not cousin_it.
From which we can infer that you already know how to win yourself. I can conclude that your decision to still play the game is an insult to your opponent.
If handicapping is necessary it should be built into the rules (or the odds). Otherwise the game becomes one in which the object is to pay lip service to 'playing in the spirit of the game' while actually getting as close to the 'PGP encryption' ideal as one can without being unduly stigmatised. If you want your attention to be dominated by that crap stop playing games of reason and go socialise.
If you have no payoff for winning, then why call it winning in the 'rationalists win' sense?
It seems that here the only payoff is in learning and so you should value an opponent that will set a task appropriate to your skill. To cooperate you should try to be that kind of opponent.
The point system might declare winners in a silly way, but why care about the points?
I would expect that one reason we gravitate toward competitive games, especially those with points, is that we can't help but treat them as signals of status. I'd in fact expect that if you ran a psych experiment with subjects playing a game, and the experimenters instructed them to play in one fashion but meaningless points were awarded under a different criterion, that people would be dramatically swayed by the point system (and possibly unaware of this fact).
I thought the object of the game was to have a fun contest in which you give your opponent a challenging problem and they do the same for you. Many games are broken, and these breaks are often called "exploits", for obvious reasons. Until it's patched, why not agree to ignore them?
Do you know what is not fun? Playing games where the real aim is to do what it takes to look impressive without going quite far enough to get shamed for it. That is 'work'. I expect people to pay me if I have to do that.
And I advocate exploiting them aggressively until those responsible patch them.
Absolutely! The approach I tend to take goes along the lines of:
The game is flawed. Let's change it to X so that it works better. Agreed?
IF agreed THEN play engaging inference game FUN! ELSE generate PGP key. win EVEN MORE FUN "The game is flawed. How about...?" END
I find this particularly useful when playing 500 with folks who like unrestricted misere calls. It usually only takes a few rounds to make them change their minds.
Agreeing to ignore them is a patch. But unless you both agree to ignore them in exactly the same way, it's not a patch, and it's no longer a fun contest, it's at best just fun.
Care to play?