Yep. I don’t think I was ever aware of the name; someone threw this puzzle at me in a job interview a while ago, so I figured I’d post it here for fun.
tetronian2
Karma: 306
I guess I didn’t formulate the rules clearly enough—if the coin lands on tails, you exit with the stake. For example, if you play and the sequence is HEADS → HEADS → TAILS, you exit with $4. The game only ends when tails is flipped.
Suppose someone offers you the chance to play the following game:
You are given an initial stake of $1. A fair coin is flipped. If the result is TAILS, you keep the current stake. If the result is HEADS, the stake doubles and the coin is flipped again, repeating the process.
How much money should you be willing to pay to play this game?
Ethereum is somewhat close to this.
It appears they are going with some kind of modal logic, which also does not appear to deal with incomplete information. I also suspect “moral” will be conflated with “utilitarian” or “utilitarian plus a diff”. But then there is this bit in the press release:
Bringsjord’s first step in designing ethically logical robots is translating moral theory into the language of logic and mathematics. A robot, or any machine, can only do tasks that can be expressed mathematically. With help from Rensselaer professor Mei Si, an expert in the computational modeling of emotions, the aim is to capture in “Vulcan” logic such emotions as vengefulness.
...which makes it sound like the utility function/moral framework will be even more ad hoc.
Possibly of local interest: Research on moral reasoning in intelligent agents by the Renssalear AI and Reasoning Lab.
(I come from a machine learning background, and so I am predisposed to look down on the intelligent agents/cognitive modelling folks, but the project description in this press release just seems laughable. And if the goal of the research is to formalize moral reasoning, why the link to robotic/military systems, besides just to snatch up US military grants?)
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.
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.
Is anyone interested in another iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournament? It has been nearly a year since the last one. Suggestions are also welcome.
Wow, I had no idea that people missed out on the tournament because I posted it to discussion. I’ll keep this in mind for next year. Apologies to Sniffnoy and BloodyShrimp and anyone else who missed the opportunity.
Good question—after running some matches:
AnderBot Cooperates until one of the copies randomly triggers a Defect, then both copies defect for the rest of the match.
CheeseBot, DMRB, SHTFT, SimpleTFTSeer, Switch, TatForTit, TwoFacedTit, and VOFB always cooperate with themselves.
Pip always defects against itself.
Thanks; fixed. And thanks for this analysis! I’ve added it to the OP.
Congratulations! If you do work it out, please do post it here—I’m still not 100% sure how TatForTit managed to exploit CheeseBot and DMRB.
Thanks; fixed.
Thank you, I was a bit confused, and that did help me understand what you were going for. I’m actually very curious to see how the correct version performs; all of the bots will be open-sourced soon, so you’re welcome to experiment. I will probably run some tests as well.
There are 11 entries; I am very impressed by the amount of effort everyone put into their bots.
I’m glad! It depends on how long it takes me to write up all of the results, but probably within 1 week.
Has anyone else seen the television show Brain Games? It is essentially intro-to-cognitive-biases aimed at the level of the average TV watcher; I was pleasantly surprised by how well it explains some basic biases with simple examples (though I have only seen an assortment of episodes from the 3rd and 4th season). However, most of the material given is not very actionable and is designed more for entertainment rather than self-improvement. Nevertheless, those interested in raising the sanity waterline and/or sparking interest in LW subjects among more average folk than we are might want to take a look at it.
The correct deadline is Sept. 15th—I extended it by 15 days because of an error in the tournament code that went unfixed for two weeks, which delayed some people from writing their bots. I’ve updated the post to reflect this, thanks for catching it. Anyone who already submitted a bot is welcome to re-submit if they want to make changes to their bot before the 15th.
Is it currently legal to run a for-money prediction market in Canada? I assume the answer is “no,” but I was surprisingly unable to find a clear ruling anywhere on the Internet. All I can find is this article which suggests that binary options (which probably includes prediction markets) exist in a legally nebulous state right now.