I sketched an entry for the original contest while on vacation, but by the time I went to write it up (before Sept. 1!) submissions were closed. My sketch looks very similar to 18-87/TFT-2D, and (as I recall) the relevant parts of the reasoning that led me to it were:
a TFT variant will win, so I’ll write a TFT variant
clearly the winner needs to beat TFT so I’ll defect on the last turn
most people will defect on the last turn so maybe I’ll defect on the last two turns
(I don’t care about the elimination thing, only the evolutionary tournament)
given that I’m around in the last few generations, I will compete against me, so I’d like to not defect against myself in the last two turns
I’ll pick some arbitrary turn to defect on like 56, and if I see that we both defected on 56 then I’ll cooperate for the last two turns
...but 1⁄1,4/4 is fewer points than 0⁄7,7/0 so it’d be better if I could defect on different turns against myself
fine, randomly between 50-80, and on turns 99-100 if my opponent acted like TFT except for a single defection, then I’ll cooperate. Or okay, why not 1-95. No, people will probably do silly thing in the first few turns. And last few. 18-87 or something.
I’d like to see competitors’ reasoning for their submissions.
Looks reasonable. However, point gain from increasing the range of i is logarithmic while the danger of opponents randomly (from your perspective) defecting within that range increases approximately linearly, so large ranges aren’t optimal. I only used 1-∞/TFT-nD as an example so I wouldn’t have to deal with decimal numbers.
My reasoning was pretty much exactly the same (only diverging slightly on the last bullet point), but I didn’t do well due to the presence of vengence bots.
I sketched an entry for the original contest while on vacation, but by the time I went to write it up (before Sept. 1!) submissions were closed. My sketch looks very similar to 18-87/TFT-2D, and (as I recall) the relevant parts of the reasoning that led me to it were:
a TFT variant will win, so I’ll write a TFT variant
clearly the winner needs to beat TFT so I’ll defect on the last turn
most people will defect on the last turn so maybe I’ll defect on the last two turns
(I don’t care about the elimination thing, only the evolutionary tournament)
given that I’m around in the last few generations, I will compete against me, so I’d like to not defect against myself in the last two turns
I’ll pick some arbitrary turn to defect on like 56, and if I see that we both defected on 56 then I’ll cooperate for the last two turns
...but 1⁄1,4/4 is fewer points than 0⁄7,7/0 so it’d be better if I could defect on different turns against myself
fine, randomly between 50-80, and on turns 99-100 if my opponent acted like TFT except for a single defection, then I’ll cooperate. Or okay, why not 1-95. No, people will probably do silly thing in the first few turns. And last few. 18-87 or something.
I’d like to see competitors’ reasoning for their submissions.
Looks reasonable. However, point gain from increasing the range of i is logarithmic while the danger of opponents randomly (from your perspective) defecting within that range increases approximately linearly, so large ranges aren’t optimal. I only used 1-∞/TFT-nD as an example so I wouldn’t have to deal with decimal numbers.
My reasoning was pretty much exactly the same (only diverging slightly on the last bullet point), but I didn’t do well due to the presence of vengence bots.