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wedrifid comments on Pract: A Guessing and Testing Game - Less Wrong
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Comments (42)
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.