Comment by Drako365 on The Darwin Game · 2020-10-11T21:12:46.388Z · LW · GW

What do you mean by information restrictions? What exactly is restricted? If I were to use some side-channel to determine that I was being simulated by an opponent and forkbomb if so, would I be eliminated for hacking? Would they be eliminated for overusing compute? (after all, it wasn't my code per say that forkbombed, but their code simulating my code) Would I be eliminated for being a dick? (Which would be self-evident, at any rate)

You say in another comment, "Simulator bots are legal for programmers to write provided they never crash, slow the game to a crawl, etc. Any bot (even a non-simulator) that does will be disqualified." I'm just concerned about the edge case where someone writes the troll code described above, and suddenly every person who submitted a simulator bot (i.e. Zak M. Davis) gets DQ'd. The rules as written suggest that such a bot (presuming it does not preserve information across rounds) would be perfectly legal and it's Zak's own fault for executing untrusted code, but that seems to effectively prohibit simulators as there's an infinite plurality of side-channels through which to do this.

A few possible resolutions would be:

1. Whoever wrote the code that contains the instructions to forkbomb is at fault. Essentially, don't be a dick.
2. Any information not explicitly given is forbidden. Essentially, you don't know if you're being simulated, and you're not allowed to find out.
3. Untrusted code is untrusted code; simulate at your own risk. Essentially, if Zak executes my forkbomb, that's his problem. (Well, your problem as well to fix it, but his fault.)

Resolution 2 seems the most reasonable to me, but if you choose it I humbly request a way to locally overwrite get_opponent_source so you simulate your opponent's response without risking infinite recursion. (Such an overwrite is probably standard python, but being ignorant of your implementation I'd be concerned about screwing something up and not being able to detect the mistake in testing)

EDIT: Upon further consideration it seems inevitable that Zak will get DQ'd for infinite recursion. So I must be missing something.