Oscar_Cunningham comments on Universal agents and utility functions - Less Wrong

29 Post author: Anja 14 November 2012 04:05AM

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Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 25 November 2012 12:35:36PM *  1 point [-]

The usage that I thought was standard was to use "decision theory" and "game theory" synonymously and then use "combinatorial game theory" to refer in particular to the games which are deterministic and have perfect knowledge e.g. Chess, Tic-tac-toe and Nim. It's combinatorial game theory for which Conway used the theory of the surreals, and I haven't heard of any use of them in game theory outside of this.

EDIT: On second thoughts, "decision theory" and "game theory" aren't synonyms; game theory is the subset of decision theory involving interactions with other agents.

Comment author: timtyler 25 November 2012 02:00:33PM 0 points [-]

Yes, but see:

Individual decision problems with stochastic outcomes are sometimes considered "one-player games".

Also, "decisions in situations where there's at least one agent around" is a pretty daft way to define a field of enquiry, IMO.