Why fixed length instead of random/unlimited length tournaments? Are there any real world situations where a fixed length scenario is more analogous than a random length one?
Personally I would find such a competition most interesting and fun when the rules are such that good strategies in the game are likely to be good strategies in other real world situations as well.
Your suggestion would very obviously turn into a tournament of nice strategies that will always cooperate once the non-nice strategies are eliminated. The “real world” isn’t analogous to any kind of IPD at all, mainly because defectors often can’t be punished. If you have a suggestion for a tournament that would to some extent actually model reality, I’m all ears; but random/unlimited length doesn’t work.
If each round came with a “situation variable” per bot that determined how ‘unfair’ the situation was—i.e, high variable means you can get away with defecting—and it wasn’t somehow just noise, that might come closer to reality. Outside of the scope of my project, though.
Are there any real world situations where a fixed length scenario is more analogous than a random length one?
Most of them. Dating, a night out at the bar, employment, driving somewhere, etc, etc. If you take a Gods-eye view and mash these all together, sure, our life is one big indefinite-length IPD, but at that point you’ve lost so much information that it’s not clear that chunks of a good indefinite strategy map to good definite strategies.
Why fixed length instead of random/unlimited length tournaments? Are there any real world situations where a fixed length scenario is more analogous than a random length one?
Personally I would find such a competition most interesting and fun when the rules are such that good strategies in the game are likely to be good strategies in other real world situations as well.
In short: because of this.
Your suggestion would very obviously turn into a tournament of nice strategies that will always cooperate once the non-nice strategies are eliminated. The “real world” isn’t analogous to any kind of IPD at all, mainly because defectors often can’t be punished. If you have a suggestion for a tournament that would to some extent actually model reality, I’m all ears; but random/unlimited length doesn’t work.
If each round came with a “situation variable” per bot that determined how ‘unfair’ the situation was—i.e, high variable means you can get away with defecting—and it wasn’t somehow just noise, that might come closer to reality. Outside of the scope of my project, though.
Most of them. Dating, a night out at the bar, employment, driving somewhere, etc, etc. If you take a Gods-eye view and mash these all together, sure, our life is one big indefinite-length IPD, but at that point you’ve lost so much information that it’s not clear that chunks of a good indefinite strategy map to good definite strategies.
LOL @ dating being analogous to a fixed length iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. [insert tired cliché joke about nerds here]