I mean, "terribly horrible" on what scale?
On a scale from 0 to "a million people died because someone was being irrational", it would be around "two million people died because someone was being irrational."
On an unrelated note, the idea of precommitting in non-repeated IPD is silly; because if both players are precommitting simultaneously (before learning of their opponent's precommittment) it's the same as no-one precommitting, since they can't update their strategy with that knowledge, and otherwise it's an asymmetrical problem.
The solution to that asymmetrical problem, if you're the one who has to make the precommittment, is to precommit to simple TFT, I think. (~100% confidence)
I'm not sure what's silly about it. Just because there's only one game of IPD doesn't mean there can't be multiple rounds of communication before, during, and after each iteration.
As for the asymmetrical problem, if you're really close to 100% confident, would you like to bet $500 against my $20 that I can't find hard experimental evidence that there's a better solution than simple TFT, where "better" means that the alternative solution gets a higher score in an arena with a wide variety of strategies? If I do find an arena like that, and you lat...
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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