By “dumb player” I did not mean as dumb as a human player. I meant “too dumb to compute the pseudorandom numbers, but not too dumb to simulate other players faithfully apart from that”. I did not realize we were talking about humans at all. This jumps out more to me as a potential source of misunderstanding than it did 15 years ago, and for that I apologize.
I did not realize we were talking about humans at all.
In this comment of yours later in that thread, it seems clear that you did have humans in mind and were talking specifically about a game between a human (namely me), and a “smart player”:
You, however, are running a very small and simple computation in your own mind when you conclude “smart players should defect on non-public rounds”. But this is assuming the smart player is calculating in a way that doesn’t take into account your simple simulation of them, and your corresponding reaction. So you are not using TDT in your own head here, you are simulating a “smart” CDT decision agent—and CDT agents can indeed be harmed by increased knowledge or intelligence, like being told on which rounds an Omega is filling a Newcomb box “after” rather than “before” their decision. TDT agents, however, win—unless you have mistaken beliefs about them that don’t depend on their real actions, but that’s a genuine fault in you rather than anything dependent on the TDT decision process; and you’ll also suffer when the TDT agents calculate that you are not correctly computing what a TDT agent does, meaning your action is not in fact dependent on the output of their computation.
Also that thread started with you saying “Don’t forget to retract: http://www.weidai.com/smart-losers.txt″ and that article mentioned humans in the first paragraph.
By “dumb player” I did not mean as dumb as a human player. I meant “too dumb to compute the pseudorandom numbers, but not too dumb to simulate other players faithfully apart from that”. I did not realize we were talking about humans at all. This jumps out more to me as a potential source of misunderstanding than it did 15 years ago, and for that I apologize.
In this comment of yours later in that thread, it seems clear that you did have humans in mind and were talking specifically about a game between a human (namely me), and a “smart player”:
Also that thread started with you saying “Don’t forget to retract: http://www.weidai.com/smart-losers.txt″ and that article mentioned humans in the first paragraph.