[cap-talk] An interesting form of wall banging

[Karp, Alan H]

"New Tack Wins Prisoner's Dilemma"
Wired News (10/13/04); Grossman, Wendy M. 
 
A team of Southampton University researchers led by computer science
professor Nick Jennings and Ph.D. student Gopal Ramchurn has triumphed
over 222 competitors in the 2004 Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma contest.
The Prisoner's Dilemma, a game theory puzzle for two players, is
described by Jennings as "a canonical problem of how to get cooperation
to emerge from selfish agents" in a scenario whereby two accomplices are
arrested and separately interrogated by the police, who offer them the
choice of confessing or keeping quiet. The Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma
is a variant of the traditional game in which the choice is repeated
over and over, enabling players to evolve a cooperative strategy by
recalling their previous moves. The long-standing champion of the
competition was the Tit for Tat strategy, in which a player consistently
cooperates with other players in its first move, and subsequently copies
the other players' actions. The Southampton team, which specializes in
software agent research, submitted 60 strategy programs designed to
carry out an established sequence of five to 10 moves by which they
could identify each other; once identification was confirmed between two
Southampton players, one player would sacrifice itself so the other
could win repeatedly. But if an opponent was identified as a
non-Southampton player, the Southampton player would defect. The
original Prisoner's Dilemma banned communication between players, but
since the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma contest permitted noise, the
Southampton players were programmed to signal their intentions to each
other in Morse Code. "Our initial results tell us that ours is an
evolutionarily stable strategy--if we start off with a reasonable number
of our colluders in the system, in the end everyone will be a colluder
like ours," explains Jennings.
 

________________________
Alan Karp
Principal Scientist
Virus Safe Computing Initiative
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
1501 Page Mill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304
(650) 857-3967, fax (650) 857-7029
https://ecardfile.com/id/Alan_Karp
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Alan_Karp

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