Last year Yvain had organised a Diplomacy game between LessWrong users to test how well we perform in practical application of game theory. At least two games had been played, but as far as I know no analysis was made afterwards. One reason is probably that few games involving complex interactions between players constitute at most anecdotal evidence for whatever hypothesis one may test. The second one is lack of comparison to outside players. Although the games were fun, their value as a game theory experiment remains rather low. Could we test our game theoretic skills in a statistically more significant way?

Only recently I have learned about Robert Axelrod's experiment in which he run a competition of different strategies playing iteraded prisoner's dilemma, and got an idea to replicate it. I have already run a similar experiment with five contestants (all being my friends) and now a second run is being prepared, with at least nine strategies in the pool. I am interested in a third run, this time with strategies nominated by LessWrongers. The contestants of the second run which has identical rules are readers of my blog and neither of them is probably familiar with specific LW ideas. Therefore, they would serve as a fairly good control group to test LW's applied rationality skills (or a subset of). After matching the strategies in both groups separately, I plan to put all of them together and see who wins.

So, if you want to participate in this contest, feel free to send me your strategy. The rules are following.

By a strategy I mean a program sent by a contestant or coded according to his/her instructions. The strategies compete in iterated prisoner's dilemmas. A single iteration I will call a turn. In each turn each strategy has to choose between cooperating and defecting. The payoffs are:
- if both cooperate, 4 points for each
- if both defect, 1 point for each
- else 7 points for the defector and 0 points for its cooperating opponent
By a match I mean a series of 100 iterations between the same opponents.
There will be two different competitions, the round-robin tournament and the evolutionary tournament. Two separate final standings will be made, one for each tournament. Any received strategy has to participate in both.
- In the round-robin tournament strategies will play one match against each other (not against a copy of themselves). The winner will b

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