solipsist comments on Prisoner's Dilemma (with visible source code) Tournament - Less Wrong

47 Post author: AlexMennen 07 June 2013 08:30AM

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Comment author: pengvado 10 June 2013 01:23:04PM *  2 points [-]

How does that help? A quine-like program could just as well put its real payload in a string with a cryptographic signature, verify the signature, and then eval the string with the string as input; thus emulating the "passed its own sourcecode" format. You could mess with that if you're smart enough to locate and delete the "verify the signature" step, but then you could do that in the real "passed its own sourcecode" format too.

Conversely, even if the tournament program itself is honest, contestants can lie to their simulations of their opponents about what sourcecode the simulation is of.

Comment author: solipsist 10 June 2013 04:10:51PM *  4 points [-]

A quine-like program could just as well put its real payload in a string with a cryptographic signature, verify the signature, and then eval the string with the string as input; thus emulating the "passed its own sourcecode" format.

Altering the internal structure of an opponent program would be very difficult, but that's not the only way to mutate a program. You can't tinker with the insides of a black box, but you can wrap a black box.

To be concrete: given an opponent's source code, I could mechanically generate an equivalent program with extremely dissimilar source code (perhaps just a block of text, a decryption routine, and a call to eval) that nevertheless acts exactly like the original program in every way. And since that mechanically-obfuscated program would act exactly like the original program in every way, the obfuscated program would not be able to detect that it had been altered. Do you agree?