I don't see this as a problem at all; in fact if you could turn TFT into a CliqueBot at an arbitrary point in the tournament, this could hardly be called evolution. I mean the whole point of this idea was to theoretically have a gaussian distribution around your starting value, and then see which value is the most successful, right? So for example, you could start with m = 10, and have a strategy TFT-nD with n = floor(abs(m/10)). This might result in high values for n if the pool is such that TFT-1D strategies are successful at first; causing lower m to die out and higher m to strive, thus shifting the bell curve.
Mmm, I thought about this and you're right. Monotonically increasing numbers might make a meta-level "defect last N" game out of the evolution - turn Clique a turn before the others do. Of course, now I also think there's a way to turn m into an increasing number as well.
I mean the whole point of this idea was to theoretically have a gaussian distribution around your starting value, and then see which value is the most successful, right?
Actually the interesting part is whether you can use m cleverly, such that your mutation/evolution takes a...
Last year, there was a lot of interest in the IPD tournament with people asking for regular events of this sort and developing new strategies (like Afterparty) within hours after the results were published and also expressing interest in re-running the tournament with new rules that allowed for submitted strategies to evolve or read their opponent's source code. I noticed that many of the submitted strategies performed poorly because of a lack of understanding of the underlying mechanics, so I wrote a comprehensive article on IPD math that sparked some interesting comments.
And then the whole thing was never spoken of again.
So now I'd like to know: How many LWers would commit to competing in another tournament of this kind, and would someone be interested in hosting it?