Omega can be replaced by amnesia

Bongo

Let's play a game. Two times, I will give you an amnesia drug and let you enter a room with two boxes inside. Because of the drug, you won't know whether this is the first time you've entered the room. On the first time, both boxes will be empty. On the second time, box A contains $1000, and Box B contains $1,000,000 iff this is the second time and you took only box B the first time. You're in the room, do take both boxes or only box B?

This is equivalent to Newcomb's Problem in the sense that any strategy does equally well on both, where by "strategy" I mean a mapping from info to (probability distributions over) actions.

I suspect that any problem with Omega can be transformed into an equivalent problem with amnesia instead of Omega.

Does CDT return the winning answer in such transformed problems?

Discuss.

Let's play a game. Two times, I will give you an amnesia drug and let you enter a room with two boxes inside. Because of the drug, you won't know whether this is the first time you've entered the room. On the first time, both boxes will be empty. On the second time, box A contains $1000, and Box B contains $1,000,000 iff this is the second time and you took only box B the first time. You're in the room, do take both boxes or only box B?

This is equivalent to Newcomb's Problem in the sense that any strategy does equally well on both, where by "strategy" I mean a mapping from info to (probability distributions over) actions.

I suspect that any problem with Omega can be transformed into an equivalent problem with amnesia instead of Omega.

Does CDT return the winning answer in such transformed problems?

Discuss.

I could change the rules and decide not to stand for such tricks (mixed strategies) either. EDIT: No, I couldn't.

And on the other hand, Omega could deal with mixed strategies perfectly well, and I don't really understand why people make it so that he explicitly doesn't tolerate mixed strategies in their problems. For example, in Newcomb's Problem, if you one-box with probability p, Omega can just fill box B with probability p - for example if p=0.5 your expected winnings in Newcomb's Problem are $500,500.

In the traditional formulation of Newcomb's Problem (at least here on Less Wrong), if Omega predicts you'll use a randomizer, it will leave box B empty.

4timtyler15y

That sounds tricky - unless you are a mind-reading superintelligence!

0timtyler15y

Use of a mixed strategy might tarnish Omega's reputation.

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Omega can be replaced by amnesia

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Omega can be replaced by amnesia

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