The most reliable fix to the recursion problem that I can think of is to implement a hard resource limit, whereby if you spend (say) 9500 of 10000 processing units on analysis, then you drop the analysis and implement a dumb strategy with whatever juice you have left. Probably wouldn’t take much more than a simple counter being incremented in a bottom-level loop somewhere, as long as you’re looking at your opponent’s source through a level of indirection rather than just jumping straight into it. Some analysis strategies might also converge on a solution rather than finding an exact one, although this would be easier and more reliable with behavioral than with source analysis.
However, trapdoors like this are exploitable: they give agents an incentive to nearly but not quite run out the clock before making a decision, in hopes that their opponents will give up and fall back on the simple and stupid. The game theory surrounding this seems to have PD-like characteristics in its own right, so it may just have pushed the relevant game-theoretical decisions up to the metagame.
There is actually a human algorithm in the cooperate/defect space—which is to distrust anyone who seems to spend a long time making a cooperate decision. Anyone who has a really quick, simple way of deciding to cooperate is OK—anyone who takes a long time is thinking about whether you will defect, or whether they should defect—and you should probably find someone else to trust. This is one of the good things about Tit for tat—it passes this test.
The most reliable fix to the recursion problem that I can think of is to implement a hard resource limit, whereby if you spend (say) 9500 of 10000 processing units on analysis, then you drop the analysis and implement a dumb strategy with whatever juice you have left. Probably wouldn’t take much more than a simple counter being incremented in a bottom-level loop somewhere, as long as you’re looking at your opponent’s source through a level of indirection rather than just jumping straight into it. Some analysis strategies might also converge on a solution rather than finding an exact one, although this would be easier and more reliable with behavioral than with source analysis.
However, trapdoors like this are exploitable: they give agents an incentive to nearly but not quite run out the clock before making a decision, in hopes that their opponents will give up and fall back on the simple and stupid. The game theory surrounding this seems to have PD-like characteristics in its own right, so it may just have pushed the relevant game-theoretical decisions up to the metagame.
There is actually a human algorithm in the cooperate/defect space—which is to distrust anyone who seems to spend a long time making a cooperate decision. Anyone who has a really quick, simple way of deciding to cooperate is OK—anyone who takes a long time is thinking about whether you will defect, or whether they should defect—and you should probably find someone else to trust. This is one of the good things about Tit for tat—it passes this test.