You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

satt comments on A simple game that has no solution - Less Wrong Discussion

10 Post author: James_Miller 20 July 2014 06:36PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (123)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: satt 20 July 2014 11:10:17PM *  0 points [-]

I think you can just compute the Nash Equilibria.

Things don't feel so simple to me. (A, X) is a Nash equilibrium (and the only pure strategy NE for this game), but is nonetheless unsatisfactory to me; if player 1 compares that pure strategy against the mixed strategy proposed by Wei_Dai, they'll choose to play Wei_Dai's strategy instead. Nash equilibrium doesn't seem to be a strong enough requirement ("solution concept") to force a plausible-looking solution. [Edit: oops, disregard this paragraph. I misinterpreted Wei_Dai's solution so switching to it from the NE pure equilibrium won't actually get player A a better payoff.]

(I also tried computing the mixed strategy NE by finding the player 1 move probabilities that maximized their expected return, but obtained a contradiction! Maybe I screwed up the maths.)