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James_Miller comments on Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: NancyLebovitz 09 December 2013 04:35PM

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Comment author: James_Miller 10 December 2013 07:13:17PM *  1 point [-]

You solve games by having solution criteria . Unfortunately, for any reasonable list of solution criteria you will always be able to find games where the result doesn't seem to make sense. Also, there is no set of obviously correct and complete solution concepts. Consider the following game:

Two rational people simultaneously and secretly write down a real number [0,100]. The person who writes down the highest number gets a payoff of zero, and the person who writes down the lowest number gets that as his payoff. If there is a tie they each get zero. What happens?

The only "Nash equilibrium" (the most important solution concept in all of game theory) is for both players to write down 0, but this is a crazy result because picking 0 is weakly dominated by picking any other number (expect 100).

Game theory also has trouble solving many games where (a) Player Two only gets to move if Player One does a certain thing, (b) Player One's strategy is determined by what he expects Player Two would do if Player Two gets to move, and (c) in equilibrium Player Two never moves.

Comment author: Emile 10 December 2013 09:53:56PM 1 point [-]

I'm not understanding you, the things you describe in this post seem to be the kind of maths a smart alien race might discover just like we did.

Comment author: James_Miller 10 December 2013 09:56:14PM 1 point [-]

Many games don't have solutions, or the solutions depend on arbitrary criteria.

Comment author: Emile 10 December 2013 10:12:01PM 2 points [-]

... and?

Are you agreeing or disagreeing with "the things you describe in this post seem to be the kind of maths a smart alien race might discover just like we did"?

Comment author: James_Miller 10 December 2013 10:26:13PM 2 points [-]

It depends on what you mean by "might" and "discover" (as opposed to invent). I predict that smart aliens' theories of physics, chemistry, and evolution would be much more similar to ours than their theories of how rational people play games would be.