Mmm, I thought about this and you're right. Monotonically increasing numbers might make a meta-level "defect last N" game out of the evolution - turn Clique a turn before the others do. Of course, now I also think there's a way to turn m into an increasing number as well.
I mean the whole point of this idea was to theoretically have a gaussian distribution around your starting value, and then see which value is the most successful, right?
Actually the interesting part is whether you can use m cleverly, such that your mutation/evolution takes advantage of likely mutations/evolutions in other bots. Staying two steps ahead in the arms race at all times would allow you to dominate the genetic pool, because the change in bots would be the new constant. (My first idea along these lines was to have TFT-nD with n being decremented by 2 when m is decremented by one, and likewise for increments - so that my bot would become the parasite of other likely TFT-variable-nDs).
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?