Why fixed length instead of random/unlimited length tournaments? Are there any real world situations where a fixed length scenario is more analogous than a random length one?
Personally I would find such a competition most interesting and fun when the rules are such that good strategies in the game are likely to be good strategies in other real world situations as well.
Are there any real world situations where a fixed length scenario is more analogous than a random length one?
Most of them. Dating, a night out at the bar, employment, driving somewhere, etc, etc. If you take a Gods-eye view and mash these all together, sure, our life is one big indefinite-length IPD, but at that point you've lost so much information that it's not clear that chunks of a good indefinite strategy map to good definite strategies.
Last year, there was a lot of interest in the IPD tournament with people asking for regular events of this sort and developing new strategies (like Afterparty) within hours after the results were published and also expressing interest in re-running the tournament with new rules that allowed for submitted strategies to evolve or read their opponent's source code. I noticed that many of the submitted strategies performed poorly because of a lack of understanding of the underlying mechanics, so I wrote a comprehensive article on IPD math that sparked some interesting comments.
And then the whole thing was never spoken of again.
So now I'd like to know: How many LWers would commit to competing in another tournament of this kind, and would someone be interested in hosting it?