Looking through the code, yep, my simulation criteria were so conservative that I only simulated the PasswordBots. OscillatingTwoThreeBot was oh so close to only having two open parentheses but it used a decorative set of parentheses in the class definition (as did many others) Looks like I didn't need simulation anyway.

I am somewhat interested in using the code to explore alternate timelines. Who wins without me? Who wins the clone showdown if it's allowed to happen? What happens if you start the game at round 90 and make the smart bots use their endgame strategies in a pool full of silly bots? What happens if you remove npc bots and have a pool of only players? Does anything interesting happen if the number of turns per round is 101 rather than 100? I'm probably not interested enough to commit to doing this in a timely manner though.

What marginal submission would win in this pool? Probably just a MimicBot with Measure's opening game. Using simulation, especially hy-compatible simulation, could make you win more as long as you didn't simulate MeasureBot, or only simulated it in a separate thread.

It's been a great ride. Thanks for running the game, lsusr.

Curated -- as a celebration of the entire sequence [? · GW]. 

(This is my first curation notice since becoming an admin.)

What can I do except gaze into the horizon and drawl "Hogwarts... needs more... plotting" 

I think games, simulations, practice, exercises, and so forth are really valuable. They help us build a culture of rationality as a craft, as an ongoing practice, that is grounded in real feedback loops. 

One fear with rationality is to end up in a "hall of mirrors": an endless chasing of your own thoughts and feelings that never actually bottom out in the real world. For example, it is said that a PhD student in literary theory can go through an entire education without ever being conclusively proven wrong. 

How much of LessWrong can you go through without ever being conclusively proven wrong? That is, how much of the Sequences can you delude yourself into understanding? How many teacher's passwords can you guess? 

I'm not sure. But having institutions like the Darwin game offers a valuable opportunity for people to have reality punch them in the face. 

Now exercises can vary along the degree to which they test your rationality. Climbing an obstacle course is also a way to end up getting a log smashed in your face... but it seems to have less relevance for rationality. However, the Darwin Game combined important elements of economics, game theory (open-source and programmatic, LessWrong style!), computer science, thinking outside the box and more.

Finally, I want to encourage and reward the large amounts of thinking that were spent on this by both Isusr and the participants, which impressed me a fair bit. Professor Quirrell thinks you... Exceeded Expectations. 

This looks more like what I would have expected to happen. Congratulations to Multicore. 

The automatic cooperation means that once you reach an endgame where everyone is always cooperating, whoever has the biggest share will win, so the game is about entering the endgame with the largest share more than being slightly better at late execution. The other games where things didn't collapse seemed weird, and it makes sense that it was largely buggy code. The other possibility is incidental perfect cooperation - e.g. if BendBot always starts 2 and Manticore always starts 3, and there are 100 turns, then the game becomes static if everyone else is gone. 

I am content with a 3rd place finish given I did it without writing code. This was sharp competition! 

If people are running new simulations, some things I'd be curious about to get juices flowing:

1. What happens if you rerun the thing a few times? Does it always look the same? Graphs seem to have some big semi-random events on them.
2. What happens if we change 100 turns/round to 101?
3. What is the simplest bot that, when added to the field, would win?
4. Could BendBot have won if it had been able to expand its logic to cover more cases and thus get off to a better start, or if it had chosen a slightly better opening sequence? What if it always started 2 and never 3? On reflection alternation was wrong, I shouldn't have hedged my bets here.
5. What happens if the reward for self-ID is lowered from 2.5/round to the theoretical maximum, where they have to figure out who starts high and who starts low? That makes an equilibrium more likely (since you can have 2 bots that do better than that against each other, because they're not identical).
6.  How much does it matter if you add in password bots for various people, or new silly bots, or take silly bots away? What happens if we don't include any silly bots or password bots? What happens if the password bots are more ofuscated, so EarlyBirdMimicBot doesn't look at them?
7. What happens if EarlyBirdMimicBot is less scared to simulate? How much faster does it win? 

For the record, here's what the 2nd place CooperateBot [Insub] did:

• On the first turn, play 2.
• On other turns:
  • If we added up to 5 on the last round, play the opponent's last move
  • Otherwise, 50% of the time play max(my last move, opponents last move), and 50% of the time play 5 minus that

My goal for the bot was to find a simple strategy that gets into streaks of 2.5's as quickly as possible with other cooperation-minded bots. Seems like it mostly worked.

Congrats Multicore, for an uncontested victory by mastering both technical and social aspects of the game!

Thanks lsusr for giving us a tournament to fight, thanks all clique members, plotting with you was fun in spades :)

I didn't win, but our clique was probably instrumental to Multicore's victory, so I'll be content with that. Until next time.

Multicore, please leave a comment on the post so I can upvote you for winning!

Three cheers for Multicore, the true player of games!

Thanks for running this! I'm a little disappointed the clique didn't make it to round 90, so that my custom code never ran, but so it goes.

Marking my predictions:

• I win: 20%.
• A CloneBot wins: 75%.
• At least one clique member submits a non-CloneBot (by accident or design): 60%.
• At least one clique member fails to submit anything: 60%. (I think this happened? I don't remember where someone said that though.)
• At least one bot tries to simulate me after the showdown and doesn't get disqualified: 10%.
• At least one bot tries to simulate me after the showdown and succeeds: 5%.
• At least one CloneBot manages to act out: 5%.
• I get disqualified: 5%.

Only two where I was on the wrong side of 50%, but giving 5% to a CloneBot acting out is embarrassing. I think if I'd said 10% I'd feel okay with it. I'm curious whether, if we started at round 90, the "after the showdown" predictions would have gone the other way; but I think I did try to price in the chance of never making it there when I made them, so. (Were there even any simulators in the clique, other than EarlyBirdMimicBot which wouldn't have tried against any of us?)

A big thanks for running this! It seemed like a massive effort to code up everything, but I think testing our rationality "in the field" with challenges like this is hugely valuable. 

I'm a little bit surprised that the presence of AbstractSpyTreeBot caused MeasureBot to do worse overall. Good game all, though. Congratulations Multicore!

Thanks for running this, and congratulations to multicore!

Who is the CooperateBot surviving the second longest? Is it CooperateBot [Larks] or CooperateBot [Insub]?

Is something strange going on in the Round 21-40 plot vs the round 41-1208 plot? It looks like the line labeled MeasureBot in the Round 21-40 plot switches to be labeled CooperateBot [Insub] in the Round 41-1208 plot. I hope my simple little bot actually did get second place!