I have been planning to organise a new tournament, which would include: variable match length, possibility to simulate opponents (up to a fixed depth of recursion), scripting language for the strategies and an interpreter thereof and perhaps evolution with mutating strategies. However, relative lack of time together with akrasia stood in the way.
If there is a strong interest in this, I will try to precommit to do it in, say, three weaks. I have already some usable pieces of code.
We shouldn't duplicate work; I'm currently writing up a tournament simulator myself. I'm confident on variable match length, evolution, noisy responses, cheap talk rounds, and natural selection population growth tournaments. I am less confident on simulating opponents. For submitted strategies, I was prepared to accept code, pseudocode, and English descriptions, and then translate them into coffeescript myself. Probably I will also ask for some example games to test my translations (e.g. "My bot should cooperate 1-98 and defect 99, 100 against pure ti...
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?