ok.

There were 5 or so teams. there were 10 or 15 "years" (rounds). Each round, you can buy brand new boats in proportion to your current fleet, go fishing with n boats, buy boats from other players, sell boats to other players...and pay a maintanence fee on your current fleet size. Each boat that goes fishing costs a little bit more to run than letting it sit in one place. The fish reproduce, but slowly.

At the very end of the game, fleet value and bank account are added up to determine the winner.

But the value of boats is player-driven...and there was no limit on how much debt you could go into. meanwhile, the cost for brand-new boats...was constant.

The instructor intended to illustrate how the prisoners dilemma plays a role in overfishing, which I don't think is what we actually wound up learning, since our metagame was winner-take-all and not a prisoner's dilemma.

...

Again: you might learn something interesting with winner-take-all, and may even need to use that as the setup to prevent cooperate-bot spam due to the types of the people on this site...but it IS a different metagame. Keep that in mind when interpreting the results.

edit2: By different metagame, I mean that this tournament posesses a nash equilibrium of programs for which each program is considered a move. Finding it is possible in finite steps(It does not run afoul of the halting problem due to the 10 second limitation, as measured by the hardware of a specific machine and environment), but a brute-force approach would probably take more memory than our universe appears to possess.

edit3: see also nshepperd's comments