A paranoid Omega may resolve to defect if and only if Rob heats up. An intelligent agent that knows Omega acts in this way should take care to cooperate without doing any expensive computations.
Another tactic would be to deliberately attempt to do expensive calculations every round, but still cooperate most of the time. By doing so, Rob maintains a consistently elevated temperature, which sabotages the signal-to-noise ratio of Omega’s “side-channel attack”. Omega will no longer be able to predict Rob’s response. It can still opt to blindly defect every round, but this is expensive to it, because Rob is mostly cooperating. So Omega may find it better to abandon that “high temperature = defect” strategy, and instead cooperate, as long as Rob cooperates frequently enough. There should be some point where, if Rob becomes too exploitative, Omega will switch to defecting.
That said, Omega can still deliberately defect every round, even at great expense, in order to try to punish Rob for obscuring its decisions. (“I will keep defecting until you play open-handed!”).
This isn’t a comment about whether or not AIXItl will notice that it can raise its temperature by performing extraneous computations, and AIXItl might never make that connection and come up with these strategies in Rob’s place. I am just pointing out that Rob has more options than just playing along cooperatively and keeping its temperature low.
The idea here is that when Rob plays against an agent that very clearly and transparently acts as described, an “ideal rational intelligent agent” (whatever that means) should be able to win, while AIXItl cannot.
There are, of course, variations of the game where Omega has not credibly precommitted to being paranoid, and in these cases, there may indeed be alternative strategies.
Another tactic would be to deliberately attempt to do expensive calculations every round, but still cooperate most of the time. By doing so, Rob maintains a consistently elevated temperature, which sabotages the signal-to-noise ratio of Omega’s “side-channel attack”. Omega will no longer be able to predict Rob’s response. It can still opt to blindly defect every round, but this is expensive to it, because Rob is mostly cooperating. So Omega may find it better to abandon that “high temperature = defect” strategy, and instead cooperate, as long as Rob cooperates frequently enough. There should be some point where, if Rob becomes too exploitative, Omega will switch to defecting.
That said, Omega can still deliberately defect every round, even at great expense, in order to try to punish Rob for obscuring its decisions. (“I will keep defecting until you play open-handed!”).
This isn’t a comment about whether or not AIXItl will notice that it can raise its temperature by performing extraneous computations, and AIXItl might never make that connection and come up with these strategies in Rob’s place. I am just pointing out that Rob has more options than just playing along cooperatively and keeping its temperature low.
The idea here is that when Rob plays against an agent that very clearly and transparently acts as described, an “ideal rational intelligent agent” (whatever that means) should be able to win, while AIXItl cannot.
There are, of course, variations of the game where Omega has not credibly precommitted to being paranoid, and in these cases, there may indeed be alternative strategies.