Golden Rule disproved.
It’s a dark day for believin’ in humankind’s essential goodness. There was an upset last week in the UK’s 20th Anniversary Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Competition–an AI contest in which programs try to either work together to earn points in small quantities, or exploit each other by stealing points in large quantities. Until now, it was a bit of consolation in an otherwise-cruel world that, given enough turns to take effect, an altruistic strategy (cooperating with everyone who cooperates with you, while remembering and countering those who don’t) would invariably win the game in the end. Straight exploitation, while providing some great initial gains, accumulates too much risk over time.
But if I understand right, this year’s winners finally dethroned the nice guys with a new, unwholesome strategy–basically, the Mafia. In successive rounds of the game, the highest-scoring programs are allowed to “reproduce,” fielding more copies of themselves. The Mafia “master” was designed to execute a signature series of moves that its clones would recognize. The clones then became kamikazes, taking the aggressive exploitation strategy and trying to amass as many short-term points as possible, without regard for their own long-term survival. They would then conspire to lose repeatedly to the master program, which would just sit back and rake in the points.
Oh well.