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:: Prison tat's not finished ::
Thursday, October 14, 2004
Wired is reporting that a team from Southampton University has won the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma competition and beaten the previous best-performing strategy, Tit for Tat (read the article for details).
Teams could submit multiple strategies, or players, and the Southampton team submitted 60 programs. These, Jennings explained, were all slight variations on a theme and were designed to execute a known series of five to 10 moves by which they could recognize each other. Once two Southampton players recognized each other, they were designed to immediately assume "master and slave" roles -- one would sacrifice itself so the other could win repeatedly.
This is akin to entering a highest-earner-wins poker tournament of 223 with 60 in-cahoots players, having the bulk of the colluders funnel their chips to an elite few, then claiming that those winners are superior poker players. Such a strategy would 1) invariably fail against an unknown opponent 2) not produce the highest per-entrant earning for the total group.
For this particular tournament however, knowing the total field would consist of only 223 contestants with no repeat-entry rules and that the group could win by merely having a single player with the highest score, it's a brilliant strategy. Just be careful about categorically labeling it superior.
Posted by morland @ 01:26 PM
:: Comments ::
The Cards take no prisoners!
Posted by: on October 15, 2004 02:28 PM
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