With the caveat that this ‘proof’ relies on the same assumptions that ‘prove’ that the rational prisoners defect in the one shot prisoners dilemma—which they don’t unless they have insufficient (or inaccurate) information about each other. At a stretch we could force the “do not trust each other” premise to include “the pirates have terrible maps of each other” but that’s not a realistic interpretation of the sentence. Really there is the additional implicit assumption “Oh, and all these pirates are agents that implement Causal Decision Theory”.
Amazing, isn’t it? :-)
It gets even more interesting when there are more than 200 pirates (and still only 100 coins).
With the caveat that this ‘proof’ relies on the same assumptions that ‘prove’ that the rational prisoners defect in the one shot prisoners dilemma—which they don’t unless they have insufficient (or inaccurate) information about each other. At a stretch we could force the “do not trust each other” premise to include “the pirates have terrible maps of each other” but that’s not a realistic interpretation of the sentence. Really there is the additional implicit assumption “Oh, and all these pirates are agents that implement Causal Decision Theory”.
It gets even more interesting when there are more than 200 pirates (and still only 100 coins).