Nice analysis; upvoted. I think you missed a layer of the competition, though.
The game wasn’t “produce the optimal strategy for this Iterated Prisoners Dilemma rule set”. It was “produce a strategy that will defeat the strategies that Discussion-section-following LWers will imagine in response to a Discussion-level post”. My strategy was planned around the idea that most respondents would anchor on Tit-for-Tat with a slight modification to demonstrate their cleverness.
That is true, however my analysis is only linked to the competition in that I want to give players the tools needed to construct successful strategies according to their own visions and determine which of these visions are any good, with little emphasis on the psychological part. Most of the submitted strategies didn’t perform poorly because other strategies were falsely anticipated, but because they were simply poorly designed.
I consider the rules and guidelines in my analysis to be of far more importance than the actual strategies.
Nice analysis; upvoted. I think you missed a layer of the competition, though.
The game wasn’t “produce the optimal strategy for this Iterated Prisoners Dilemma rule set”. It was “produce a strategy that will defeat the strategies that Discussion-section-following LWers will imagine in response to a Discussion-level post”. My strategy was planned around the idea that most respondents would anchor on Tit-for-Tat with a slight modification to demonstrate their cleverness.
That is true, however my analysis is only linked to the competition in that I want to give players the tools needed to construct successful strategies according to their own visions and determine which of these visions are any good, with little emphasis on the psychological part. Most of the submitted strategies didn’t perform poorly because other strategies were falsely anticipated, but because they were simply poorly designed.
I consider the rules and guidelines in my analysis to be of far more importance than the actual strategies.
The next most obvious step is now, of course, to start another prisoner’s dilemma tournament and see whether the strategies improved.