Hmm. I was thinking that determinism requires that you get the same output in the same situation, but I guess I was not accounting for the fact that we do not require the two nodes in the information set to be the same situation, we only require that they are indistinguishable to the agent.
It does seem realistic to have the absent minded driver flip a coin. (although perhaps it is better to model that as a third option of flipping a coin, which points to chance node.)
On the other hand, If I am a deterministic Turing machine, and Omega simulates me and puts a dollar in whichever of two boxes he predicts I will not pick, then I cannot win this game unless I have an outside source of randomness.
It seems like in different situations, you want different models. It seems to me like you have two different types of agents: a deterministic dUDT agent and a randomized rUDT agent. We should be looking at both, because they are not the same. I also do not know which one I am as a human.
By asking about the Absent-Minded Driver with a coin, you were phrasing the problem so that it does not matter, because an rUDT agent is just a dUDT agent which has access to a fair coin that he can flip any number of times at no cost.
I agree that there is a difference, and I don't know which model describes humans better. It doesn't seem to matter much in any of our toy problems though, apart from AMD where we really want randomness. So I think I'm going to keep the post as is, with the understanding that you can remove randomness from the model if you really want to.
This post was inspired by Benja's SUDT post. I'm going to describe another simplified model of UDT which is equivalent to Benja's proposal, and is based on standard game theory concepts as described in this Wikipedia article.
First let's define what is a "single player extensive-form game with chance moves and imperfect information":
Now let's try using that to solve some UDT problems:
Absent-Minded Driver is the simplest case, since it's already discussed in the literature as a game of the above form. It's strange that not everyone agrees that the best strategy is indeed the best, but let's skip that and move on.
Psy-Kosh's non-anthropic problem is more tricky, because it has multiple players. We will model it as a single-player game anyway, putting the decision nodes of the different players in sequence and grouping them together into information sets in the natural way. The resulting game tree is complicated, but the solution is the same as UDT's. As a bonus, we see that our model does not need any kind of anthropic probabilities, because it doesn't specify or use the probabilities of individual nodes within an information set.
Wei Dai's coordination problem is similar to the previous one, but with multiple players choosing different actions based on different information. If we use the same trick of folding all players into one, and group the decision nodes into information sets in the natural way, we get the right solution again. It's nice to see that our model automatically solves problems that require Wei's "explicit optimization of global strategy".
Counterfactual Mugging is even more tricky, because writing it as an extensive-form game must include a decision node for Omega's simulation of the player. Some people are okay with that, and our model gives the right solution. But others feel that it leads to confusing questions about the nature of observation. For example, what if Omega used a logical coin, and the player could actually check which way the coin came up by doing a long calculation? Paying up is probably the right decision, but our model here doesn't have enough detail.
Finally, Agent Simulates Predictor is the kind of problem that cannot be captured by our model at all, because logical uncertainty is the whole point of ASP.
It's instructive to see the difference between the kind of UDT problems that fit our model and those that require something more. Also it would be easy to implement the model as a computer program, and solve some UDT problems automatically. (Though the exercise wouldn't have much scientific value, because extensive-form games are a well known idea.) In this way it's a little similar to Patrick's work on modal agents, which made certain problems solvable on the computer by using modal logic instead of enumerating proofs. Now I wonder if other problems that involve logical uncertainty could also be solved by some simplified model?