In addition to current posters, these tournaments generate external interest. I, and more importantly So8res, signed up for an account at LessWrong for one of these contests.
Wow, I was not aware of that. I saw that the last one got some minor attention on Hacker News and Reddit, but I didn’t think about the outreach angle. This actually gives me a lot of motivation to work on this year’s tournament.
So, to follow up on this, I’m going to announce the 2015 tournament in early August. Everything will be the same except for the following:
Random-length rounds rather than fixed length
Single elimination instead of round-robin elimination
More tooling (QuickCheck-based test suite to make it easier to test bots, and some other things)
Edit: I am also debating whether to make the number of available simulations per round fixed rather than relying on a timer.
I also played around with a version in which bots could view each other’s abstract syntax tree (represented as a GADT), but I figured that writing bots in Haskell was already enough of a trivial inconvenience for people without involving a special DSL, so I dropped that line of experimentation.
Is anyone interested in another iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournament? It has been nearly a year since the last one. Suggestions are also welcome.
In addition to current posters, these tournaments generate external interest. I, and more importantly So8res, signed up for an account at LessWrong for one of these contests.
Wow, I was not aware of that. I saw that the last one got some minor attention on Hacker News and Reddit, but I didn’t think about the outreach angle. This actually gives me a lot of motivation to work on this year’s tournament.
Oops! I misremembered. So8res’ second post was for that tournament, but his first was two weeks earlier. Shouldn’t have put words in his mouth, sorry!
So, to follow up on this, I’m going to announce the 2015 tournament in early August. Everything will be the same except for the following:
Random-length rounds rather than fixed length
Single elimination instead of round-robin elimination
More tooling (QuickCheck-based test suite to make it easier to test bots, and some other things)
Edit: I am also debating whether to make the number of available simulations per round fixed rather than relying on a timer.
I also played around with a version in which bots could view each other’s abstract syntax tree (represented as a GADT), but I figured that writing bots in Haskell was already enough of a trivial inconvenience for people without involving a special DSL, so I dropped that line of experimentation.