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.
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.