Captain Tagon: Lt. Commander Shodan, years ago when you enlisted you asked for a job as a martial arts trainer.
Captain Tagon: And here you are, trying to solve our current problem with martial arts training.
Captain Tagon: How's that saying go? "When you're armed with a hammer, all your enemies become nails?"
Shodan: Sir,.. you're right. I'm being narrow-minded.
Captain Tagon: No, no. Please continue. I bet martial arts training is a really, really useful hammer.
I didn't get into it earlier, but everyman's a little more complicated. it runs through each match test one at a time from most likely to least, and checks after each match how much time it has left, if it starts to run out, it just leaves with the best strategy its figured out. By controlling how much time you pass in, strategies can avoid n^2 processing problems. Its why I thought it was so necessary to include even if it does give hints if strategies are being simulated or not. Everyman was built as a sort of upper bound. its one of the least efficient strategies one might implement.
Actually, it seems that crashes it. thanks for the catch. I hadn't tested copy_cat against itself and should have. Forbidding strategies to pass their opponent fixes that, but it does indicate my program may not be as stable as I thought. I'm going to have to spend a few more days checking for bugs sense I missed one that big. thanks eugman.
I've written a pretty good program to complete variant 3 but I'm such a lurker on this site i lack the nessesary karma to submit it as a article. So here it is as a comment instead:
Inspired by prase's contest, (results here) and Eliezer_Yudkowsky's comment, I've written a program that plays iterated games of prisoners dilemma, with the cravat that each player can simulate his opponent. I'm now running my own contest. You can enter your onwn strategy by sending it to me in a message. Deadline to enter is Sunday September 25. The contest itself will run shor...
Like many problems in self improvement I think this comes down to a two essential factors, Practice and Evaluation. Social activities like convincing people need extensive real world practice to effectively apply, even with the best advice. However, improvement can only be made if you know how effective you are actions are.
that much is obvious
As an initial suggestion: locate only groups on difficult but none controversial topics and practice convincing people of things, asking them to rate their knowledge, opinions and beliefs before and after
perhaps we could set up such a thing here on less wrong for people to practice on one another or does that seem to Dark arts to people?
a lot of the comments here are critical of the way these scenarios are presented, but I don't believe there is in fact any deep issue. the fact of the matter remains, if you are in a situation where you have two things which you do not yet have the information to differentiate, and you know they have a state in some binary property, and that this state for one is independent of the other. Then, if you learn, by any means, that one of these objects has a specific state (call it A) with regard to the binary property, your probability needs to adjust to p(bo...
I'll be there (registered just to say that)
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
-Richard Feynman
taken from wiki quotes which took it from Stephen Hawking's book Universe in a Nutshell which took it from Feynman's blackboard at the time of this death (1988)
its simple but it gets right at the heart of why the mountains of philosophy are the foothills of AI (as Eliezer put it) .