You did an awesome job hosting the last tournament, and supplying competitors with a scripting language for their strategies is an excellent idea, so I hope you can do it. How would you implement evolution and variable match length though?
Also, I think if you could quantify "strong interest", more people might be willing to sign up for this. I definitely have a strong interest in this.
Evolution:
Each agent is represented by a function; for concreteness let it be a real function of some relevant subset of previous turns. If the return value on a given turn is positive, the agent cooperates, else it defects. The function is represented as a tree; each node is a function with a fixed number of parameters (zero parameters = constant). Mutations are realised as cutting random branches and replacing them by constants. Sexual reproduction would take two functions and swap some branches. Population dynamics would be basically the same as in the ...
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?