Basically, there is always going to be some clever strategy of possibly detecting whether you’re a sim. And it may be best at that point to just say so. So the game should have three outputs: C, D, and S. S gets you zero points and gets your opponent the points they’d get if you played C. It’s clearly suboptimal. So you’d only say it to signal, “I’m smarter than you and I know you’re simulating me”. And if they’ve ever seen you say it in real life, they know you’re just bluffing. I believe that this response, if you actually were a sim being run by your opponent, would be the best way to get your opponent to cooperate on the last turn.
This doesn’t solve the problem of removing obvious, trivial ways to tell if you’re a sim. But it does mean that if there’s no shortcuts, so that the the smarter bot will win that battle of wills, then they have something useful to say for it (beyond just “I’m TFT so you shouldn’t defect until the last turn”)
Basically, there is always going to be some clever strategy of possibly detecting whether you’re a sim. And it may be best at that point to just say so. So the game should have three outputs: C, D, and S. S gets you zero points and gets your opponent the points they’d get if you played C. It’s clearly suboptimal. So you’d only say it to signal, “I’m smarter than you and I know you’re simulating me”. And if they’ve ever seen you say it in real life, they know you’re just bluffing. I believe that this response, if you actually were a sim being run by your opponent, would be the best way to get your opponent to cooperate on the last turn.
This doesn’t solve the problem of removing obvious, trivial ways to tell if you’re a sim. But it does mean that if there’s no shortcuts, so that the the smarter bot will win that battle of wills, then they have something useful to say for it (beyond just “I’m TFT so you shouldn’t defect until the last turn”)