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loup-vaillant comments on A Series of Increasingly Perverse and Destructive Games - Less Wrong Discussion

11 Post author: nigerweiss 14 February 2013 09:22AM

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Comment author: Psy-Kosh 15 February 2013 06:00:24AM 7 points [-]

Game3 has an entirely separate strategy available to it: Don't worry initially about trying to win... instead code a nice simulator/etc for all the inhabitants of the simulation, one that can grow without bound and allows them to improve (and control the simulation from inside).

You might not "win", but a version of three players will go on to found a nice large civilization. :) (Take that Omaga.)

(In the background, have it also running a thread computing increasingly large numbers and some way to randomly decide which of some set of numbers to output, to effectively randomize which one of the three original players wins. Of course, that's a small matter compared to the simulated world which, by hypothesis, has unbounded computational power available to it.)

Comment author: loup-vaillant 16 February 2013 03:51:30PM 0 points [-]

Argh, you beat me to it! But frankly, how's that not obvious? Omega is giving us unbounded computational power, and we wouldn't use it?

Now there may be a catch. Nothing says the hyper-computer actually computes the programs, even those that do return a value. It could for instance detect the separation between your nice simulated advanced civilization and the background program, and not compute the simulation at all. You could counteract that strategy, but then the Hyper-computer may be smarter than that.

Comment author: Psy-Kosh 16 February 2013 11:58:12PM 0 points [-]

Looking down the thread, I think one or two others may have beat me to it too. But yes, It seems at least that Omega would be handing the programmers a really nice toy and (conditional on the programmers having the skill to wield it), well..

Yes, there is that catch, hrm... Could put something into the code that makes the inhabitants occasionally work on the problem, thus really deeply intertwining the two things.

Comment author: private_messaging 21 February 2013 10:50:24AM 0 points [-]

This is what's rather unsatisfactory with the notion of subjective experience as 'computation' - optimizations that do not affect the output may be unsafe from the inside perspective - even if the beings inside simulator sometimes work on the problem, the hyper-compiler might optimize too much out. Essentially, you end up with 'zombie' hypercomputers that don't have anyone inside, and 'non zombie' hypercomputers inside of which beings really live.