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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Prisoner's dilemma tournament results - Less Wrong
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Comments (122)
Why does submitting CooperateBot to a competition that does not include it make someone a troll? Would submitting DefectBot make one a troll, too?
(I believe the competition should have automatically included one CooperateBot and DefectBot each, and stated that this was the case at the beginning. I am sad there were three CooperateBots and no DefectBots.)
I think the idea is that someone submitting CooperateBot is not trying to win. But I find this a poor excuse. (It's why I always give the maximum possible number whenever I play "guess 2/3rds of the average.") I agree that the competition should have been seeded with some reasonable default bots.
Submitting DefectBot makes you a CDT agent, not a troll.
As one of the players who submitted a cooperatebot (yes, I see the irony), allow me to explain my reasoning for doing so. I scoped the comments to see what bots were being suggested (mimicbots, prudentbots, etc) and I saw much more focus on trying to enforce mutual cooperation than trying to exploit bots that can be exploited. I metagamed accordingly, hypothesizing that the other bots would cooperate with a cooperatebot but possibly fail to cooperate with each other. My hypothesis was incorrect, but worth testing IMO.
Thank you.
There's a problem with that logic. Did you really expect the people designing exploitation bots to talk about them publicly?
How do we draw the line? Tit-for-Tat is very simple, yet does very well. Arguably before knowing how it performs it could be considered a troll.
Considering this was an experimental tournament, learning how certain strategies perform against others seems far more interesting to me than winning, and I can't imagine any strategy I would label as a troll submission. Even strategies solely designed to be obstacles are valid and valuable contributions, and the fact that random strategies skew the results is a fault of the tournament rules and not of the strategies themselves.
Can you elaborate on this?
You are right that I used the inflammatory t-word because CooperateBot submitters are probably not trying to win. I certainly expected to see DefectBots (or CliqueBots from optimists), and agree that the competition should have been seeded with both CooperateBots and DefectBots.
But I don't understand this at all:
To me, this looks like t-wording the people who play 0.
Are we thinking of the same game, where the payout is constant?
Yes, that game. My point is that complaining "that's not fair, X player wasn't playing to win" is a failure to think like reality. You know that you're playing against humans, and that humans do lots of things, including playing games in a way that isn't playing to win. You should be taking that into account when modeling the likely distribution of opponents you're going to face. This is especially true if there isn't a strong incentive to play to win.
Yes, and I agree with this. I'm familiar with Straw Vulcanism and accept that guessing incorrectly is my mistake, not others'.
It seems anger and frustration were read into my comment, when in fact I was merely surprised, so I've edited out the offending t-word.