Who said anything about sentience? NDT, as described, is a perfectly comprehensible program that (in certain games that you or I would regard as fair tests) generates spurious counterfactuals and thus makes terrible decisions, thanks to a particular kind of circularity.

In this sequence, I'm not talking about FAI or anything beyond my current understanding, and I'm not intentionally drawing metaphors. I'm simply outlining programs which (if I could write a good automated theorem-prover) I could write myself, and comparing how they do in a straightforward tournament setting, with the twist of allowing read-access to source codes. We should be able to agree on that base level.