Can you be more precise? Always cooperating in the prisoner's dilemma is not going to be optimal. Are you thinking of something like where each side is allowed to simulate the other? In that case, see here.

I'm looking for a mathematical model for the prisoners dilemma that results in cooperation. Anyone know where I can find it?

A friend of mine has started going into REM in frequent 5 minutes cycles during the day, in order to boost his learning potential. He developed this via multiple acid trips. Is that safe? It seems like there should be some sort of disadvantage to this system but so far he seems fine.

How familiar are you with this area? I think that this sort of thing is already well-studied, but I have only vague memories to go by.

As an aside, you only need (AND and NOT) or (OR and NOT), not all three; and if you have NAND or NOR, either of those is sufficient by itself.

... and if most of the people you admire are also pro gay marriage and pro abortion, it is evidence that you are not open-minded.

I think I've figured out a basic neural gate. I will do my best to describe it.

4 nerves: A,B,X,Y, A has it's tail connected to X. B has it's tail connected to X and Y. If A fires, X fires. If B fires, X and Y fire. If A then B fire, X will fire then Y will fire (X need a small amount of time to reset, so B will only be able to activate Y). If B then A fire, X and Y will fire at the same time.

This feels like it could be similar to the AND circuit. Just like modern electronics need AND, OR, and NOT, if I could find all the nerve gates I'd have all the parts needed to build a brain. (or at least a network based computer)

I like this idea. It's difficult to implement; I have enough computers, but my attempt at enforcing their roles hasn't worked so well.

I've had better success with weaker, outdated hardware: anything without wireless internet access, for starters. Unfortunately, the fact that it's weaker and outdated means it tends to break, and repairs become more difficult due to lack of official support. Then they sort of disappear whenever things get moved due to being least used, and I'm back to having to put willpower against the most modern bells and whistles in my possession.

Generally speaking, the less powerful the internet capabilities, the better. Perhaps a good idea of the optimal amount of data to use would help pick a service plan that disincentivizes wasteful internet use? Or maybe even dialup, if one can get by without streaming video and high-speed downloads.

Another possibility is office space without internet access. Bonus points if there's a way to make getting there easier than leaving (without going overboard, of course).

Or, a strictly monitored or even public internet connection for work, where anything that is not clearly work-related is visible (hopefully, to someone whose opinion/reaction would incentivize staying on task).

If possible, not even having a personal internet connection, and using public locations (Starbucks? Libraries?) when internet is necessary might be another strategy. If work requires internet access, but not necessarily active, one could make lists of the things that need downloading, and the things that do not, and plan around internet availability (this worked pretty well for me in parts of high school, but your mileage may vary).

These solutions all have something in common: I can't really implement any of them right now, without doing some scary things on the other end of a maze constructed from Ugh Fields, anxiety, and less psychological obstacles. So my suggesting them is based on a tenuous analysis of past experience.

This is kind of funny because I came to this open thread to ask something very similar.

I have noticed that my mind has a "default mode" which is to aimlessly browse the internet. If I am engaged in some other activity, no matter how much I am enjoying it, a part of my brain will have the strong desire to go into default mode. Once I am in default mode, it takes active exertion to break away do anything else, no matter how bored or miserable I become. As you can imagine, this is a massive source of wasted time, and I have always wished that I could stop this tendency. This has been the case more or less ever since I got my first laptop when I was thirteen.

I have recently been experimenting with taking "days off" of the internet. These days are awesome. The day just fills up with free time, and I feel much calmer and content. I wish I could be free of the internet and do this indefinitely.

But there are obvious problems, a few of which are:

• Most of the stuff that I wish I was doing instead of aimlessly surfing the internet involves the computer and oftentimes the internet. A few of the things that would be "good uses of my time" are reading, making digital art, producing electronic music, or coding. Three out of four of those things rely on the computer, and of those three, they oftentimes in some capacity rely on the internet.

• I am inevitably going to be required to use the internet for school and work. Most likely in my graphic design and computer science classes next year I will have to be able to use the internet on my laptop during class.

• If I have an important question that I could find the answer to on Google, I'm going to want to find that answer.

It's hard to find an eloquent solution to this problem. If I come up with a plan for avoiding internet use that is too loose, it will end up getting more and more flexible until it falls apart completely. If the plan is too strict, then I inevitably will not be able to follow it and will abandon it. If the plan is too intricate and complicated, then I will not be able to make myself follow it either.

The best idea I have come up with so far is to delete all the browsers from my laptop and put a copy of Chrome on a flash drive. I would never copy this instance of Chrome onto a hard drive, instead I would just run it from the flash drive every time I wanted to use it. This way, every time I wanted to use the internet, I would have to go find the flash drive. I could also give the flash drive to someone else for a while if I felt like a moment of weakness was coming on. I've been using this for exactly one day and it seems to be working pretty well so far.

The other thing I've been doing for a few days is writing a "plan" of the next day before I go to bed, then sticking to the plan. If something happens to interrupt my plan, then I will draft a new plan as soon as possible. For example, my friend called me up today inviting me over. I wasn't about to say "No, I can't hang out, I have planned out my day and it didn't include you". So when I got back, I wrote a new one. Most of these plans involve limiting internet use to some degree, so this also seems promising. I might also do something where I keep track of how many days in a row I followed the plan and try not to break the chain.

I have a random mathematical idea, not sure what it means, whether it is somehow useful, or whether anyone has explored this before. So I guess I'll just write it here.

Imagine the most unexpected sequence of bits. What would it look like? Well, probably not what you'd expect, by definition, right? But let's be more specific.

By "expecting" I mean this: You have a prediction machine, similar to AIXI. You show the first N bits of the sequence to the machine, and the machine tries to predict the following bit. And the most unexpected sequence is one where the machine makes the most guesses wrong; preferably all of them.

More precisely: The prediction machine starts with imagining all possible algorithms that could generate sequences of bits, and it assigns them probability according to the Solomonoff prior. (Which is impossible to do in real life, because of the infinities involved, etc.) Then it receives the first N bits of the sequence, and removes all algorithms which would not generate a sequence starting with these N bits. Now it normalizes the probabilities of the remaining algorithms, and lets them vote on whether the next bit would be 0 or 1.

However, our sequence is generated in defiance to the prediction machine. We actualy don't have any sequence in advance. We just ask the prediction machine what is the next bit (starting with the empty initial sequence), and then do the exact opposite. (There is some analogy with Cantor's diagonal proof.) Then we send the sequence with this new bit to the machine, ask it to predict the next bit, and again do the opposite. Etc.

There is this technical detail, that the prediction machine may answer "I don't know" if exactly half of the remaining algorithms predict that the next bit will be 0, and other half predicts that it will be 1. Let's say that if we receive this specific answer, we will always add 0 to the end of the sequence. (But if the machine thinks it's 0 with probability 50.000001%, and 1 with probability 49.999999%, it will output "0", and we will add 1 to the end of the sequence.)

So... at the beginning, there is no way to predict the first bit, so the machine says "I don't know" and the first bit is 0. At that moment, the prediction of the following bit is 0 (because the "only 0's" hypothesis is very simple), so the first two bits are 01. I am not sure here, but my next prediction (though I am predicting this with naive human reasoning, no math) would be 0 (as in "010101..."), so the first three bits are 011. -- And I don't dare to speculate about the following bits.

The exact sequence depends on how exactly the prediction machine defines the "algorithms that generate the sequence of bits" (the technical details of the language these algorithms are written in), but can still something be said about these "most unexpected" sequences in general? My guess is that to a human observer they would seem like a random noise. -- Which contradicts my initial words that the sequence would not be what you'd expect... but I guess the answer is that the generation process is trying to surprise the prediction machine, not me as a human.

I'm really not clear on what this is actually supposed to be a metaphor for.

It's clearly not something you would literally want to do, since the night is temporary and the light provided by the map is dim and brief. But maybe this is a metaphorical long-lasting night and bright burning map?