I probably misunderstand what you mean. People temporarily cooperate all the time even if all of them know that in the end “there can be only one”. It may be advantageous to band with your near-clones and hope that you are better than them when dealing with others, thus gaining a decisive edge.
OK, I got it. (It helps if you look at the single thread, and click on “Show more comments above.” to see the entire chain.)
This contest is supposed to rank strategies for iterated PD. Your one-escape-pod comment suggests you are interested in a contest that finds the winner stategy when there can be a single winner. That would be a very different kind of contest, though supperficially similar.
Obviously, a ranking contest can be transformed into a winner-picking contest, by declaring the first-ranked candidate the winner, if there is a mechanism for enforcing the lack of ties for first place. This mechanism is not necessarily easy to add unless the contest is designed for it from the beginning, and since there are lots of possible ranking methods it is probably often impossible.
But due to the superficial similarity (and perhaps an abuse of technical language), I think the distinction between what this contest does and what you wanted it to do was lost somewhere in your initial exchange with Eliezer.
Of course, what you say about temporary cooperation is perfectly correct. I think our terminology misunderstanding stems from the perspective, I was more focused on the entire contest (which is more adversarial, as the goal is the be ranked above others), and I believe you were focusing on the individual encounters (which are slightly more cooperative, since mutual destruction is very bad). We probably don’t disagree on what the words mean, we were just thinking of different issues.
(This is a constant danger when discussing games composed of other games (e.g. the iterated tournament), so we should probably have been more explicit. In retrospective Eliezer using the word “fair” should have been a warning everyone is talking about different things...)
I probably misunderstand what you mean. People temporarily cooperate all the time even if all of them know that in the end “there can be only one”. It may be advantageous to band with your near-clones and hope that you are better than them when dealing with others, thus gaining a decisive edge.
OK, I got it. (It helps if you look at the single thread, and click on “Show more comments above.” to see the entire chain.)
This contest is supposed to rank strategies for iterated PD. Your one-escape-pod comment suggests you are interested in a contest that finds the winner stategy when there can be a single winner. That would be a very different kind of contest, though supperficially similar.
Obviously, a ranking contest can be transformed into a winner-picking contest, by declaring the first-ranked candidate the winner, if there is a mechanism for enforcing the lack of ties for first place. This mechanism is not necessarily easy to add unless the contest is designed for it from the beginning, and since there are lots of possible ranking methods it is probably often impossible.
But due to the superficial similarity (and perhaps an abuse of technical language), I think the distinction between what this contest does and what you wanted it to do was lost somewhere in your initial exchange with Eliezer.
Of course, what you say about temporary cooperation is perfectly correct. I think our terminology misunderstanding stems from the perspective, I was more focused on the entire contest (which is more adversarial, as the goal is the be ranked above others), and I believe you were focusing on the individual encounters (which are slightly more cooperative, since mutual destruction is very bad). We probably don’t disagree on what the words mean, we were just thinking of different issues.
(This is a constant danger when discussing games composed of other games (e.g. the iterated tournament), so we should probably have been more explicit. In retrospective Eliezer using the word “fair” should have been a warning everyone is talking about different things...)