I disagree that they are all that interesting: a lot of TASes don’t look like “amazing skilled performance that brings you to tears to watch” but “the player stands in place twitching for 32.1 seconds and then teleports to the YOU WIN screen”.
I fully concede that a Paperclip Maximizer is way less interesting if there turns out to be some kind of false vacuum that allows you to just turn the universe into a densely tiled space filled with paperclips expanding at the speed of light.
It would be cool to make an classification of games where perfect play is interesting (Busy Beaver Game, Mao, Calvinball) vs games where it is boring (Tic-Tac-Toe, Checkers). I suspect that since Go is merely EXP-Time complete (not Turing complete) it falls in the 2nd category. But it’s possible that e.g. optimal Go play involves a Mixed Strategy Nash Equilibrium drawing on an infinite set of strategies with ever-decreasing probability.
Problem left for the reader: prove the existence of a game which is not Turing Complete but where optimal play requires an infinite number of strategies such that no computable algorithm outputs all of these strategies.
the idea of A and D being in an eternal stasis is improbable
I did cheat in the story by giving D a head start (so it could eternally outrun A by fleeing away at 0.99C). However, in general this depends on how common intelligent life is elsewhere in the universe. If the majority of A’s future light-cone is filled with non-paperclipping intelligent beings (and there is no false-vacuum/similar “hack”), then I think A has to remain intelligent.
I fully concede that a Paperclip Maximizer is way less interesting if there turns out to be some kind of false vacuum that allows you to just turn the universe into a densely tiled space filled with paperclips expanding at the speed of light.
It would be cool to make an classification of games where perfect play is interesting (Busy Beaver Game, Mao, Calvinball) vs games where it is boring (Tic-Tac-Toe, Checkers). I suspect that since Go is merely EXP-Time complete (not Turing complete) it falls in the 2nd category. But it’s possible that e.g. optimal Go play involves a Mixed Strategy Nash Equilibrium drawing on an infinite set of strategies with ever-decreasing probability.
Problem left for the reader: prove the existence of a game which is not Turing Complete but where optimal play requires an infinite number of strategies such that no computable algorithm outputs all of these strategies.
I did cheat in the story by giving D a head start (so it could eternally outrun A by fleeing away at 0.99C). However, in general this depends on how common intelligent life is elsewhere in the universe. If the majority of A’s future light-cone is filled with non-paperclipping intelligent beings (and there is no false-vacuum/similar “hack”), then I think A has to remain intelligent.