Sorry if this is a stupid question, but this tournament looked to me like a thinly disguised version of:

"Construct a robot that can read code and interpret what it means."

which is a Really Hard Problem.

Is that not a fair description? Was there some other way to approach the problem?

The only way I can see to go about constructing a GOOD entrant to this is to write something that can take as its input the code of the opponent and interpret what it will actually DO, that can recognize the equivalence between (say):

return DEFECT

and

if 1: return DEFECT return COOPERATE

and can interpret things like:

if oppcode == mycode return COOPERATE return DEFECT

And I have no idea how to go about doing that. From the fact that the winning entrants were all random, it seems safe to say that no entrants had any idea how to go about doing that either.

Am I missing something here?

The person who says, as almost everyone does say, that human life is of infinite value, not to be measured in mere material terms, is talking palpable, if popular, nonsense. If he believed that of his own life, he would never cross the street, save to visit his doctor or to earn money for things necessary to physical survival. He would eat the cheapest, most nutritious food he could find and live in one small room, saving his income for frequent visits to the best possible doctors. He would take no risks, consume no luxuries, and live a long life. If you call it living. If a man really believed that other people's lives were infinitely valuable, he would live like an ascetic, earn as much money as possible, and spend everything not absolutely necessary for survival on CARE packets, research into presently incurable diseases, and similar charities.

In fact, people who talk about the infinite value of human life do not live in either of these ways. They consume far more than they need to support life. They may well have cigarettes in their drawer and a sports car in the garage. They recognize in their actions, if not in their words, that physical survival is only one value, albeit a very important one, among many.

-- David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom

The only noticeable difference is that amateurs lacked the upswing at 50 years, and were relatively more likely to push their predictions beyond 75 years. This does not look like good news for the experts - if their performance can't be distinguished from amateurs, what contribution is their expertise making?

I believe you can put your case even a bit more strongly than this. With this amount of data, the differences you point out are clearly within the range of random fluctuations; the human eye picks them out, but does not see the huge reference class of similarly "different" distributions. I predict with confidence over 95% that a formal statistical analysis would find no difference between the "expert" and "amateur" distributions.

I believe government should be much more localized and I like the idea of charter cities. Competition among governments is good for citizens just as competition among businesses is good for consumers. Of course, for competition to really work out, immigration should not be regulated.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_city

If you wish to advance into the infinite, explore the finite in all directions.

That sounds incredibly deep. (By which I mean it is bullshit.)

Oh, and every time someone in this world tries to build a really powerful AI, the computing hardware spontaneously melts.

Would have been a good punch if the humans ended up melting away the aliens' computer simulating our universe.

A good and useful abstraction that is entirely equivalent to Turing machines, and to humans much more useful, is Lambda calculus and Combinator calculi. Many of these systems are known to be Turing complete.

Lambda calculus and other Combinator calculi are rule-sets that rewrite a string of symbols expressed in a formal grammar. Fortunately the symbol-sets in all such grammars are finite and can therefore be expressed in binary. Furthermore, all the Turing complete ones of these calculi have a system of both linked lists and boolean values, so equivalent with the Turing machine model expressed in this article, one can write a programme in a binary combinator calculus and feed it a linked list of boolean values expressed in the combinator calculus itself and then have it reduce itself (return) a linked list of boolean values.

Personally I prefer combinator calculi to Turing machines mainly because they are vastly easier to program.

Related:

• Lambda Calculus
• SKI Calculus
• Binary Lambda Calculus
• Binary Combinatory Logic

Is there a simple summary of why you think this is true of intelligence when it turned out not to be true of, say, durability, or flightspeed, or firepower, or the ability to efficiently convert ambient energy into usable form, or any of a thousand other evolved capabilities for which we've managed to far exceed our physiological limits with technological aids?

To follow up on what olalonde said, there are problems that appear to get extraordinarily difficult as the number of inputs increases. Wikipedia suggests that the know best solutions to the traveling salesman problem is on the order of O(2^n), where n is the number of inputs. Saying that adding computational ability resolves these issues for actual AGI implies either:

1) AGI trying to FOOM won't need to solve problems as complicated as traveling salesman type problems, or

2) AGI trying to FOOM will be able to add processing power at a rate reasonably near O(2^n), or

3) In the process of FOOM, an AGI will be able to determine P=NP or similarly revolutionary result.

None of those seem particularly plausible to me. So for reasonable sized n, AGI will not be able to solve problems appreciably better than humans.

One of the most direct methods for an agent to increase its computing power (does this translate to an increase in intelligence, even logarithmically?) is to increase the size of its brain. This doesn't have an inherent upper limit, only ones caused by running out of matter and things like that, which I consider uninteresting.