Are there strategies that, if publicly announced, will let a more sophisticated player defect on the first round and get away with it? Sure. There are also slightly better strategies that can be publicly announced without allowing for useful first-round defection. Either way, though, the gains from even shaky cooperation in a 100-round game are on the order of 70 or 80 million lives -- letting those gains slip by because you're worried about losing 1 million lives on the first round is a mistake. There's a tendency to worry about losing face, or, as Andreas puts it, not being defeated. But with real stakes on the table, you should only worry about maximizing points. Your pride isn't worth millions of lives.
Any strategy that takes being publicly announced (and precommitted to) into account and still allows the opponent to get away with defecting the first round ist a terribly horrible strategy.
Publicly announcing is not actually precommitting. If Clippy says it plays TFT-1D, for how long would you really cooperate?
It seems to me there is little benefit to playing the strategy you announced, or vice versa.
Today's post, The Truly Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma was originally published on 04 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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