Last August or so, Eliezer asked Steve Rayhawk and myself to attempt to solve Newcomb’s problem together.  This project served a couple of purposes:
a.  Get an indication as to our FAI research abilities.
b.  Train our reduction-muscles.
c.  Check whether Eliezer’s (unseen by us) timeless decision theory is a point that outside folks tend to arrive at independently (at least if starting from the rather substantial clues on OB/LW), and whether anything interestingly new came out of an independent attempt.

Steve and I (and, briefly but helpfully, Liron Shapira) took our swing at Newcomb.  We wrote a great mass of notes that have been sitting on our hard drives, but hadn’t stitched them together into a single document.  I’d like to attempt a Less Wrong sequence on that subject now.  Most of this content is stuff that Eliezer, Nesov, and/or Dai developed independently and have been referring to in their posts, but I’ll try to present it more fully and clearly.  I learned a bit of this from Eliezer/Nesov/Dai’s recent posts.

Here’s the outline, to be followed up with slower, clearer blog posts if all goes well: