lackofcheese comments on Sneaky Strategies for TDT - Less Wrong
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That's still not quite the formulation of the problem I was considering, though it seems valid. Admittedly, your formulation is closer to the original idea since it does say "multiple simulations", though I will note that the number of simulations has to be something like O(1/epsilon) for the difference to be noticeable.
My previous strategy was designed for a variant of the problem where Omega only simulates a single instance of the problem (and calculates the probabilities directly from the source code of C-sim).
Sorry I misunderstood you then.
Does your variant looks like this?
What is the best strategy for TDT to play as C-act?
If that is the problem, then consider the following. It still uses the "unlucky number" construction from the set {1, 2, ..., 10}. Each C-act will always choose its unlucky number with lowest probability, so the money is always in C-sim's unlucky number box.
If C-sim has a different unlucky number from C-act then
Else
End If
That looks like winning with probability 9/10 x (1 - epsilon) + 1/10 x (1/10 - epsilon) so close to 91%.
Is there a better strategy though?
P.S. We are getting some interesting behaviour here, with slight variations under the conditions for selecting C-sim and calculating its choice probabilities leading to very different best strategies (and different success probabilities such as 10%, 50%, 91% or close to 100%). Quite fascinating.
Yeah, that's the problem I had in mind, and your "unlucky number" strategy definitely seems pretty solid in that case.