earthwormchuck163 comments on A Series of Increasingly Perverse and Destructive Games - Less Wrong

11 Post author: nigerweiss 14 February 2013 09:22AM

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Comment author: earthwormchuck163 15 February 2013 08:35:39AM 0 points [-]

How does your proposed solution for Game 1 stack up against the brute-force metastrategy?

Well the brute force strategy is going to do a lot better, because it's pretty easy to come up with a number bigger than the length of the longest program anyone has ever thought to write, and then plugging that into your brute force strategy automatically beats any specific program that anyone has ever thought to write. On the other hand, the meta-strategy isn't actually computable (you need to be able to decide whether program produces large outputs, which requires a halting oracle or at least a way of coming up with large stopping times to test against). So it doesn't really make sense to compare them.