Sometime in the near future, I will be running an iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournament in which bots can access their opponents’ source code, similar to the IPD tournament that was held last year. This tournament will be open to the Internet at large (i.e. not just LW) and will probably include some Hacker News folks and some folks from my real-life social network, who are primarily programmers and people in the finance world. Once everything is officially announced, there will be a large window (a month?) in which users can submit entries before the tournament is run. Also, to help out non-programmer participants, I will be translating some participants’ pseudocode/descriptions of algorithms into code. More details on this later.
The (work in progress) code that will be used to run the tournament is here.
Right now everything is still in the preliminary stages, so I would appreciate:
comments about what made last year’s tournament good/bad/etc.
suggestions for the rules and payoff matrix/feature requests to make the tournament more interesting
IIRC last time the winners were programs that had some random element in their code and “got lucky” (in the sense that if the tournament had been run multiple times and the results averaged, they would not have won). So maybe you should guard against this by performing sufficiently many copies of the tournament.
Sometime in the near future, I will be running an iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournament in which bots can access their opponents’ source code, similar to the IPD tournament that was held last year. This tournament will be open to the Internet at large (i.e. not just LW) and will probably include some Hacker News folks and some folks from my real-life social network, who are primarily programmers and people in the finance world. Once everything is officially announced, there will be a large window (a month?) in which users can submit entries before the tournament is run. Also, to help out non-programmer participants, I will be translating some participants’ pseudocode/descriptions of algorithms into code. More details on this later.
The (work in progress) code that will be used to run the tournament is here.
Right now everything is still in the preliminary stages, so I would appreciate:
comments about what made last year’s tournament good/bad/etc.
suggestions for the rules and payoff matrix/feature requests to make the tournament more interesting
code review
general comments (i.e., yell at me)
The code in the github repo doesn’t actually give bots access to each other’s source, just the ability to run each other.
It’s also lacking handling for bots that run forever.
Thanks for the feedback. I agree on both points; I will probably change the wording to what you suggested.
IIRC last time the winners were programs that had some random element in their code and “got lucky” (in the sense that if the tournament had been run multiple times and the results averaged, they would not have won). So maybe you should guard against this by performing sufficiently many copies of the tournament.