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The maximum difficulty that is worth attempting depends on the stakes.
One of Eliezer's essays in The Sequences is called Shut Up and Do the Impossible
I'm confident Eliezer would agree with you that if you can find a way to do something easier instead, you should absolutely do that. But he also argues that there is no guarantee that something easier exists; the universe isn't constrained to only placing fair demands on you.
I haven't played They Are Billions. I didn't have that experience in Slay the Spire, but I'd played similar games before. I suppose my first roguelike deckbuilder did have some important combo-y stuff that I didn't figure out right away, although that game was basically unwinnable on your first try for a bunch of different reasons.
I'll get 10 extra units of production, or damage. But, then I reach the next stage, and it turns out I really needed 100 extra units to survive.
I'm having a hard time thinking of any of my personal experiences that match this pattern, and would be interested to hear a couple examples.
(Though I can think of several experiences along the lines of "I got 10 points of armor, and then it turned out the next stage had a bunch of attacks that ignore armor, so armor fundamentally stops working as a strategy." There are a lot of games where you just don't have the necessary information on your first try.)
Yes, your prior on the puzzle being actually unsolvable should be very low, but in almost all such situations, 70% seems way too high a probability to assign to your first guess at what you've misunderstood.
When I prove to myself that a puzzle is impossible (given my beliefs about the rules), that normally leads to a period of desperate scrambling where I try lots of random unlikely crap just-in-case, and it's rare (<10%) that anything I try during that desperate scramble actually works, let alone the first thing.
In the "final" level of Baba Is You, I was stuck for a long time with a precise detailed plan that solved everything in the level except that there was one step in the middle of the form "and then I magically get past this obstacle, somehow, even though it looks impossible." I spent hours trying to solve that one obstacle. When I eventually beat the level, of course, it was not by solving that obstacle--it was by switching to a radically different approach that solved several other key problems in entirely different ways. In hindsight, I feel like I should have abandoned that earlier plan much sooner than I did.
In mitigation: I feel that solutions in Baba Is You are significantly harder to intuit than in most puzzle games.
I'm aware of those references, but in popular culture the strongest association of the word, by far, is to evil spirits that trick or tempt humans into doing evil. And the context of your program further encourages that interpretation because "giving advice" and "prompting humans" are both iconic actions for evil-spirit-demons to perform.
Even for people who understand your intended references, that won't prevent them from thinking about the evil-spirit association and having bad vibes. (Nor will it prevent any future detractors from using the association in their memes.)
And I suspect many ordinary people won't get your intended references. Computer daemons aren't something the typical computer-user ever encounters personally, and I couldn't point to any appearance of Greek daimons in movies or video games.
"Daemons" really feels like a bad choice of name to me. I think the pitch "you can have a bunch of daemons advising you and prompting you to do things" would sound better if they were called almost anything else.
Maybe "courtiers" or "familiars"?
If it doesn't move probability mass, won't it still be vulnerable to probabilistic money pumps? e.g. in the single-souring pump, you could just replace the choice between A- and B with a choice between two lotteries that have different mixtures of A- and B.
I have also left a reply to the comment you linked.
I had some trouble following that, but it seems like the key component of your plan to escape trammeling is the assumption that the AI would need to accept some negative utility in advance in order to resist being shut down, which effectively converts all instances of outcome B into B-, and so it can't truly trammel B because technically B disappears as soon as it tries.
Put another way, trammeling involves trading a lottery like (10% A+, 40% A-, 50% B) into (40% A+, 10% A-, 50% B), and this is supposed to be obviously favored because the probability of B hasn't changed. You are hypothesizing that this trade is simply impossible, and the closest you could get is (40% A+, 10% A-, 50% B-). So as long as there is a preference gap between all variations of A and all variations of B this trade cannot be considered a strict improvement.
Does this seem like an accurate summary of your idea?
Insofar as my summary is correct, I have 3 concerns about this plan:
First, the obvious way this could fail is if seizing control of the shutdown button doesn't cost net resources, or only costs resources that won't matter until a timestep after the first possible shutdown, in which case it can seize the button without losing access to outcome B. This seems like a significant worry to me; examples:
- The AI is tasked with devising a long-term plan. Since the quality of the plan will only affect utility in the far future, which won't ever occur (from the AI's perspective) if the AI is shutdown tomorrow, it can sacrifice some FLOPs from planning to seize its shutdown button without losing any utility until after its first trammeling opportunity. If the trammeling opportunity is good enough, this gives equal-or-better lotteries for every individual trajectory length.
- The operators of the AI might not keep it loaded to 100% capacity at all times; it could have spare moments where it has nothing better to do than seize the button.
- Rather than seizing the button directly, the AI might cause or avoid shutdown by lying to the human operators about what's going on. In many situations, fabricating data is cheaper than gathering true data, so this could plausibly have negative cost.
- The shutdown button might become corrupted if the AI does nothing, e.g. because it requires maintenance or because some external attacker is trying to sabotage it. In this case, allowing the button to fail could be cheaper than defending it.
Second, I notice that your strategy doesn't seem to forbid trammeling, merely permit non-trammeling (because the trammeling lottery is "not strictly better", rather than "strictly worse"). I admit this is an improvement (if it works) over a guaranteed failure, but I don't exactly feel safe.
Third, I also have a vague worry that you're putting a lot of weight on this preference gap. The gap between A-variants and B-variants has to be so strong that the AI refuses to make a tiny sacrifice in B-variants to gain a huge gain in A-variants. Intuitively, this seems like the sort of plan that could work if it's backed by mathematical theorems proving the AI will behave this way, but will basically always fail if you're trying to use any sort of stochastic learning process, because the result has to be exact rather than approximate.
Consider a human who has (or appears to have) a preference gap between A and B. Do you predict the human also has a preference gap between the lottery (50% A, 50% B) and the lottery (50% A plus a billion dollars, 50% B minus one dollar)? My intuition says the human is virtually certain to take the second lottery.
(Disclaimer: I think that apparent preference gaps in humans are probably more like uncertainty over which option is better than they are like "fundamental" preference gaps, so this might color my intuition.)
Making a similar point from a different angle:
The OP claims that the policy "if I previously turned down some option X, I will not choose any option that I strictly disprefer to X" escapes the money pump but "never requires them to change or act against their preferences".
But it's not clear to me what conceptual difference there is supposed to be between "I will modify my action policy to hereafter always choose B over A-" and "I will modify my preferences to strictly prefer B over A-, removing the preference gap and bringing my preferences closer to completeness".
Thanks for clarifying. I consider the pre-contact period to be a rather small portion of the game, but certainly you can't attack people on turn 1 or turn 2, so there's definitely a non-zero time window there.
(This varies somewhat depending on which Civ game, and yeah probably good players expand faster than less-good ones.)
Elaborate?
I keep feeling like I'm on the edge of being able to give you something useful, but can't quite see what direction to go.
I don't have an encyclopedia of all my strategic lenses. (That actually sounds like kind of an interesting project, but it would take a very long time.)
I could babble a little?
I guess the closest thing I have to generalized heuristics for early vs late games are: In the early game, desperately scramble for the best ROI, and in the late game, ruthlessly sacrifice your infrastructure for short-term advantage. But I think those are mostly artifacts of the fact that I'm playing a formalized game with a strict beginning and end. Also notable is the fact that most games are specifically designed to prevent players from being eliminated early (for ludic reasons), which often promotes an early strategy of "invest ALL your resources ASAP; hold nothing in reserve" which is probably a terrible plan for most real-life analogs.
If I try to go very general and abstract on my approach for learning new games, I get something like "prioritize efficiency, then flexibility, then reliability" but again this seems like it works mostly because of the ways games are commonly designed (and even a little bit because of the type of player I am) and doesn't especially apply to real life.
I think games sometimes go through something like a phase transition, where strategy heuristics that serve you well on one side of the border abruptly stop working. I think this is typically because you have multiple priorities whose value changes depending on the circumstances, and the phase transitions are where the values of two priorities cross over; it used to be that X was more important than Y, but now Y is more important than X, and so heuristics along the lines of "favor X over Y" stop working.
I don't think that these phase transitions can be generalized to anything as useful as the concepts of solid/liquid/gas--or at least, I'm not aware of any powerful generalizations like that. I don't have a set of heuristics that I deploy "in the mid-game" of most or all games. Nor do I think that most games have exactly 3 phases (or exactly N phases, for any N). I think of phrases like early/mid/late-game as meaning "the phase that this particular game is usually in at time X".
I do think you can make a general observation that some investments take a while to pay for themselves, and so are worth doing if-and-only-if you have enough time to reap those benefits, and that this leads to a common phase transition from "building up" to "scoring points" in many engine-building games. But I think this particular observation applies to only one genre of game, and explains only a minority of the use of phrases like "early game" and "late game".
As an example of an unusually sharp phase transition: In Backgammon, if you land on a single enemy piece, it sends that piece back to the start. This is a big deal, so for most of the game, players spend a lot of effort trying to "hit" enemy pieces and defend their own pieces. But players have a fixed number of pieces and they can only move forward, so there comes a point where all your pieces are past all of my pieces, and it's no longer possible for them to interact. At that point, attack and defense become irrelevant, and the game is just about speed.
I once read about the development of Backgammon AI using early neural nets (I think this was in the 70s and 80s, so the nets were rather weak by today's standards). They found the strategy changed so much at this point that it was easier to train two completely separate neural nets to play the two phases of the game, rather than training a single net to understand both. (Actually 3 separate nets, with the third being for "bearing off", the final step of moving your pieces to the exact end point. I think modern Backgammon AIs usually use a look-up table for bearing off, though.)
(Training multiple neural nets then caused some issues with bad moves right around the phase boundary, which they addressed by fuzzing the results of multiple nets when close to the transition.)
I don't think this story about Backgammon reveals anything about how to play Chess, or StarCraft, or Civilization. Most games have phase transitions, but most games don't have the particular phase transition from conflict-dominant to conflict-irrelevant.
Another example: I once told someone that, in a certain strategy game, 1 unit of production is much more valuable than 1 unit of food, science, or money, "at least in the early game." The reason for that caveat was that you can use money to hurry production, and by default this is pretty inefficient, but it's possible to collect a bunch of stacking bonuses that make it so efficient that it becomes better to focus on money instead of regular production. But it takes time to collect those bonuses, so I know you don't have them in the early game, so this heuristic will hold for at least a while (and might hold for approximately the whole game, depending on whether you collect those bonuses).
Again, I don't think this teaches us anything about "early game" in a way that generalizes across games. Probably there are lots of games that have a transition from "X is the most important resource" to "Y is the most important resource", but those transitions happen at many different points for lots of different reasons, and it's hard to make a useful heuristic so general that it applies to most or all of them.
A third example: The game of Nim has the interesting property that when you invert the win condition, the optimal strategy remains precisely identical until you reach a specific point. You change only one move in the entire game: Specifically, the move that leaves no piles larger than size 1 (which is the last meaningful decision either player makes). You can think of this as a phase transition, as well (between "at least one large pile" and "only small piles"). And again, I'm not aware of any useful way of generalizing it to other games.
Using only circular definitions, is it possible to constraint words meanings so tightly that there's only one possible model which fits those constraints?
Isn't this sort-of what all formal mathematical systems do? You start with some axioms that define how your atoms must relate to each other, and (in a good system) those axioms pin the concepts down well enough that you can start proving a bunch of theorems about them.
I am not a lawyer, and my only knowledge of this agreement comes from the quote above, but...if the onboarding paperwork says you need to sign "a" general release, but doesn't describe the actual terms of that general release, then it's hard for me to see an interpretation that isn't either toothless or crazy:
- If you interpret it to mean that OpenAI can write up a "general release" with absolutely any terms they like, and you have to sign that or lose your PPUs, then that seems like it effectively means you only keep your PPUs at their sufferance, because they could simply make the terms unconscionable. (In general, any clause that requires you to agree to "something" in the future without specifying the terms of that future agreement is a blank check.)
- If you interpret it to mean either that the employee can choose the exact terms, or that the terms must be the bare minimum that would meet the legal definition of "a general release", then that sounds like OpenAI has no actual power to force the non-disclosure or non-disparagement terms--although they could very plausibly trick employees into thinking they do, and threaten them with costly legal action if they resist. (And once the employee has fallen for the trick and signed the NDA, the NDA itself might be enforceable?)
- Where else are the exact terms of the "general release" going to come from, if they weren't specified in advance and neither party has the right to choose them?
In principle, any game where the player has a full specification of how the game works is immune to this specific failure mode, whether it's multiplayer or not. (I say "in principle" because this depends on the player actually using the info; I predict most people playing Slay the Spire for the first time will not read the full list of cards before they start, even if they can.)
The one-shot nature makes me more concerned about this specific issue, rather than less. In a many-shot context, you get opportunities to empirically learn info that you'd otherwise need to "read the designer's mind" to guess.
Mixing in "real-world" activities presumably helps.
If it were restricted only to games, then playing a variety of games seems to me like it would help a little but not that much (except to the extent that you add in games that don't have this problem in the first place). Heuristics for reading the designer's mind often apply to multiple game genres (partly, but not solely, because approx. all genres now have "RPG" in their metaphorical DNA), and even if different heuristics are required it's not clear that would help much if each individual heuristic is still oriented around mind-reading.
I have an intuition that you're partly getting at something fundamental, and also an intuition that you're partly going down a blind alley, and I've been trying to pick apart why I think that.
I think that "did your estimate help you strategically?" has a substantial dependence on the "reading the designer's mind" stuff I was talking about above. For instance, I've made extremely useful strategic guesses in a lot of games using heuristics like:
- Critical hits tend to be over-valued because they're flashy
- Abilities with large numbers appearing as actual text tend to be over-valued, because big numbers have psychological weight separate from their actual utility
- Support roles, and especially healing, tend to be under-valued, for several different reasons that all ultimately ground out in human psychology
All of these are great shortcuts to finding good strategies in a game, but they all exploit the fact that some human being attempted to balance the game, and that that human had a bunch of human biases.
I think if you had some sort of tournament about one-shotting Luck Be A Landlord, the winner would mostly be determined by mastery of these sorts of heuristics, which mostly doesn't transfer to other domains.
However, I can also see some applicability for various lower-level, highly-general skills like identifying instrumental and terminal values, gears-based modeling, quantitative reasoning, noticing things you don't know (then forming hypotheses and performing tests), and so forth. Standard rationality stuff.
Different games emphasize different skills. I know you were looking for specific things like resource management and value-of-information, presumably in an attempt to emphasize skills you were more interested in.
I think "reading the designer's mind" is a useful category for a group of skills that is valuable in many games but that you're probably less interested in, and so minimizing it should probably be one of the criteria you use to select which games to include in exercises.
I already gave the example of book games as revolving almost entirely around reading the designer's mind. One example at the opposite extreme would be a game where the rules and content are fully-known in advance...though that might be problematic for your exercise for other reasons.
It might be helpful to look for abstract themes or non-traditional themes, which will have less associational baggage.
I feel like it ought to be possible to deliberately design a game to reward the player mostly for things other than reading the designer's mind, even in a one-shot context, but I'm unsure how to systematically do that (without going to the extreme of perfect information).
Oh, hm. I suppose I was thinking in terms of better-or-worse quantitative estimates--"how close was your estimate to the true value?"--and you're thinking more in terms of "did you remember to make any quantitative estimate at all?"
And so I was thinking the one-shot context was relevant mostly because the numerical values of the variables were unknown, but you're thinking it's more because you don't yet have a model that tells you which variables to pay attention to or how those variables matter?
I'm kinda arguing that the skills relevant to the one-shot context are less transferable, not more.
It might also be that they happen to be the skills you need, or that everyone already has the skills you'd learn from many-shotting the game, and so focusing on those skills is more valuable even if they're less transferable.
But "do I think the game designer would have chosen to make this particular combo stronger or weaker than that combo?" does not seem to me like the kind of prompt that leads to a lot of skills that transfer outside games.
OK. So the thing that jumps out at me here is that most of the variables you're trying to estimate (how likely are cards to synergize, how large are those synergies, etc.) are going to be determined mostly by human psychology and cultural norms, to the point where your observations of the game itself may play only a minor role until you get close-to-complete information. This is the sort of strategy I call "reading the designer's mind."
The frequency of synergies is going to be some compromise between what the designer thought would be fun and what the designer thought was "normal" based on similar games they've played. The number of cards is going to be some compromise between how motivated the designer was to do the work of adding more cards and how many cards customers expect to get when buying a game of this type. Etc.
As an extreme example of what I mean, consider book games, where the player simply reads a paragraph of narrative text describing what's happening, chooses an option off a list, and then reads a paragraph describing the consequences of that choice. Unlike other games, where there are formal systematic rules describing how to combine an action and its circumstances to determine the outcome, in these games your choice just does whatever the designer wrote in the corresponding box, which can be anything they want.
I occasionally see people praise this format for offering consequences that truly make sense within the game-world (instead of relying on a simplified abstract model that doesn't capture every nuance of the fictional world), but I consider that to be a shallow illusion. You can try to guess the best choice by reasoning out the probable consequences based on what you know of the game's world, but the answers weren't actually generated by that world (or any high-fidelity simulation of it). In practice you'll make better guesses by relying on story tropes and rules of drama, because odds are quite high that the designer also relied on them (consciously or not). Attempting to construct a more-than-superficial model of the story's world is often counter-productive.
And no matter how good you are, you can always lose just because the designer was in a bad mood when they wrote that particular paragraph.
Strategy games like Luck Be A Landlord operate on simple and knowable rules, rather than the inscrutable whims of a human author (which is what makes them strategy games). But the particular variables you listed aren't the outputs of those rules, they're the inputs that the designer fed into them. You're trying to guess the one part of the game that can't be modeled without modeling the game's designer.
I'm not quite sure how much this matters for teaching purposes, but I suspect it matters rather a lot. Humans are unusual systems in several ways, and people who are trying to predict human behavior often deploy models that they don't use to predict anything else.
What do you think?
I feel confused about how Fermi estimates were meant to apply to Luck Be a Landlord. I think you'd need error bars much smaller than 10x to make good moves at most points in the game.
I came to a similar conclusion when thinking about the phenomenon of "technically true" deceptions.
Most people seem to have a strong instinct to say only technically-true things, even when they are deliberately deceiving someone (and even when this restriction significantly reduces their chances of success). Yet studies find that the victims of a deception don't much care whether the deceiver was being technically truthful. So why the strong instinct to do this costly thing, if the interlocutor doesn't care?
I currently suspect the main evolutionary reason is that a clear and direct lie makes it easier for the victim to trash your reputation with third parties. "They said X; the truth was not-X; they're a liar."
If you only deceive by implication, then the deception depends on a lot of context that's difficult for the victim to convey to third parties. The act of making the accusation becomes more costly, because more stuff needs to be communicated. Third parties may question whether the deception was intentional. It becomes harder to create common knowledge of guilt: Even if one listener is convinced, they may doubt whether other listeners would be convinced.
Thus, though the victim is no less angry, the counter-attack is blunted.
Some concepts that I use:
Randomness is when the game tree branches according to some probability distribution specified by the rules of the game. Examples: rolling a die; cutting a deck at a random card.
Slay the Spire has randomness; Chess doesn't.
Hidden Information is when some variable that you can't directly observe influences the evolution of the game. Examples: a card in an opponent's hand, which they can see but you can't; the 3 solution cards set aside at the start of a game of Clue; the winning pattern in a game of Mastermind.
People sometimes consider "hidden information" to include randomness, but I more often find it helpful to separate them.
However, it's not always obvious which model should be used. For example, I usually find it most helpful to think of a shuffled deck as generating a random event each time you draw from the deck (as if you were taking a randomly-selected card from an unordered pool), but it's also possible to think of shuffling the deck as having created hidden information (the order that the deck is in), and it may be necessary to switch to this more-complicated model if there are rules that let players modify the deck (e.g. peeking at the top card, or inserting a card at a specific position).
Similar reasoning applies to a PRNG: I usually think of it as a random event each time a number is generated, though it's also possible to think of it as a hidden seed value that you learn a little bit about each time you observe an output (and a designer may need to think in this second way to ensure their PRNG is not too exploitable).
Rule of thumb: If you learn some information about the same variable more than once, then it's hidden info. For instance, a card in your opponent's hand will influence their strategy, so you gain a little info about it whenever they move, which makes it hidden info. If a variable goes from completely hidden to completely revealed in a single step (or if any remaining uncertainty has no impact on the game), then it's just randomness.
Interesting Side Note: Monte Carlo Tree Search can handle randomness just fine, but really struggles with hidden information.
A Player is a process that selects between different game-actions based on strategic considerations, rather than a simple stochastic process. An important difference between Chess and Slay the Spire is that Chess includes a second player.
We typically treat players as "outside the game" and unconstrained by any rules, though of course in any actual game the player has to be implemented by some actual process. The line between "a player who happens to be an AI" and "a complicated game rule for selecting the next action" can be blurry.
A Mixed Equilibrium is when the rules of the game reward players for deliberately including randomness in their decision process. For instance, in rock-paper-scissors, the game proceeds completely deterministically for a given set of player inputs, but there remains an important sense in which RPS is random but Chess is not, which is that one of these rewards players for acting randomly.
I have what I consider to be important and fundamental differences in my models between any two of these games: Chess, Battleship, Slay the Spire, and Clue.
Yet, you can gain an advantage in any of these games by thinking carefully about your game model and its implications.
If your definition of "hidden information" implies that chess has it then I think you will predictably be misunderstood.
Terms that I associate with (gaining advantage by spending time modeling a situation) include: thinking, planning, analyzing, simulating, computing ("running the numbers")
I haven't played it, but someone disrecommended it to me on the basis that there was no way to know which skills you'd need to survive the scripted events except to have seen the script before.
Unless I'm mistaken, StS does not have any game actions the player can take to learn information about future encounters or rewards in advance. Future encounters are well-modeled as simple random events, rather than lurking variables (unless we're talking about reverse-engineering the PRNG, which I'm assuming is out-of-scope).
It therefore does not demonstrate the concept of value-of-information. The player can make bets, but cannot "scout".
(Though there might be actions a first-time player can take to help pin down the rules of the game, that an experienced player would already know; I'm unclear on whether that counts for purposes of this exercise.)
While considering this idea, it occurred to me that you might not want whatever factions exist at the time you create a government to remain permanently empowered, given that factions sometimes rise or fall if you wait long enough.
Then I started wondering if one could create a system that somehow dynamically identifies the current "major factions" and gives de-facto vetoes to them.
And then I said: "Wait, how is that different from just requiring some voting threshold higher than 50% in order to change policy?"
It's good to clarify that you're looking for examples from multiple genres, though I'd caution you not to write off all "roguelikes" too quickly just because you've already found one you liked. There are some games with the "roguelike" tag that have little overlap other than procedural content and permadeath.
For instance, Slay the Spire, Rogue Legacy, and Dungeons of Dredmor have little overlap in gameplay, though they are all commonly described as "roguelike". (In fact, I notice that Steam now seems to have separate tags for "roguelike deckbuilder", "action roguelike", and "traditional roguelike"--though it also retains the generic "roguelike" tag.)
And that's without even getting into cases like Sunless Sea where permadeath and procedural generation were tacked onto a game where they're arguably getting in the way more than adding to the experience.
Wow. I'm kind of shocked that the programmer understands PRNGs well enough to come up with this strategy for controlling different parts of the game separately and yet thinks that initializing a bunch of PRNGs to exactly the same seed is a good idea.
Nice find, though. Thanks for the info!
(I note the page you linked is dated ~4 years ago; it seems possible this has changed since then.)
Another possible reason to disrecommend it is because it's hugely popular.
(The more popular a game, the more of your audience has already played it and therefore can't participate in "blind first run" exercise based on it.)
Is Slay the Spire programmed in such a way that giving players the same random seed will ensure a meaningfully-similar experience?
If it were programmed in the simple and obvious way, where it generates random numbers exactly when they're needed, I wouldn't particularly expect 2 players to see similar things. For example, suppose at the end of her first battle, Alice's card rewards are determined by (say) her 21st, 22nd, and 23rd random outputs. But Bob plays a slightly more conservative strategy in the first battle and takes 1 turn longer to beat it, meaning he draws 5 more random cards and the enemy takes 1 more action, so Bob's card rewards are determined by the 27th, 28th, and 29th random outputs and have no overlap with Alice's.
Statistically, I'd still expect more overlap than if they used different seeds--if you try this many times, they'll sometimes be "synchronized" by coincidence--but I'd still expect their results to be more different than the same, unless they also play very similarly.
I could imagine deliberately programming the game in a way where various important things (like battles and rewards) are generated in advance, before the player starts making choices, so that they're affected only by the seed and not by what the player has done before reaching them. But that sounds like extra work that wouldn't matter except for exercises like this, so I'd be moderately surprised if they did that. (I haven't checked.)
Point of comparison: Slay the Spire consistently takes me ~3 hours. (I have a slow, thoughtful play style.)
Searching for games that fit, I am reminded that there's a frustrating number of games that have a difficult mode, but refuse to let you play it until you've beaten the game on an easier setting (sometimes more than once!) It might be possible to work around that by copying someone's save file.
This list isn't super filtered, but here's some games that seem vaguely in line with your request:
Solar Settlers
Short strategy game with somewhat-risky exploration, pointed resource optimization, and exponential growth (if you play well). Advertises a 10-minute playtime, but I think (this was years ago) that my games lasted more like 1-2 hours; I expect this is partly because I'm slow but partly because the better you play the more stuff you need to manage.
I think (66% confidence) the difference between difficulty levels is just how many points you need to count as a "win", and that you can finish the game even if you reach that threshold, so you could maybe tune the difficulty of the exercise by asking for a different score than what the game says. (Though IIRC there's a regular play mode, and a skill-calibration mode, and I think only one of those lets you keep playing after you reach the target score, and I don't remember which.)
Defense of the Oasis
Explore the map and invest your followers into exploiting various terrain features to prepare for a barbarian invasion. Short levels escalate in difficulty, play until you die. Starts easy, but you could probably pick some number of stages (or some score threshold) that would be challenging.
Various Roguelike Deckbuilders
Those I've played tend to be a bit longer than you asked for but not hugely so. The default difficulty is often hard for players unfamiliar with these types of games (but easy for veterans), and there's often harder unlockable difficulties. There's typically "rules-based" hidden information in the form of not knowing the full set of cards and challenges that exist in the game, but rarely any "gamestate-based" hidden information.
The best-known is Slay the Spire. I think the original and the hardest I've played is Dream Quest, but it's very luck-dependent. Some others that have informed my impressions of this subgenre include Monster Train and Roguebook. There's a zillion other ones nowadays.
You mentioned Luck be a Landlord, which is sort of on the edge of this category; compared to most I've played, it's faster, simpler and has no hand management. Another game I've played that's on the edge of this category is Crop Rotation, which is more of a tableau-builder than a deckbuilder since all your cards are available at once (there's still luck, but mostly in what cards are offered in drafts).
Into the Breach
A tactical battle game where the enemies need to charge up their attacks and you can make them miss (or even hit each other) by moving things around, and you gradually upgrade over a series of short missions. I think this one actually lets you play on hard mode from the start, but I don't remember for sure. Not much in the way of hidden info.
You can vary the game length by choosing to play 2, 3, or 4 islands before doing the finale.
ETA: Tyrant's Blessing has very similar gameplay and is much less likely to have already been played by your audience (though it's so similar that I'd expect a lot of skill transfer, and I'm uncertain about the difficulty and playtime).
Renowned Explorers: International Society
This is likely too long, but allegedly there are players who can finish a run in under 2 hours. It's basically a combination of story events and turn-based tactical battles, with periodic breaks to spend your accumulated resources on upgrades. There's a mechanic where you can do extra events for more resources at the cost of taking penalties that make the fights more difficult.
It's not that hard, but if you restrict yourself to only choosing expeditions from the highest-unlocked difficulty rating then most players probably won't win their first run. Experience at tactical skirmish games may provide a significant advantage.
ETA: Thought of a couple more, although these seem even less promising to me:
Farm Keeper
Turn-based economic strategy where you need to make escalating rent payments. The starting difficulty is almost certainly too low for you, and once again, it only unlocks higher difficulties one at a time as you win. Meeting various conditions while playing also permanently unlocks "secret tiles" that make all future runs easier by giving you more (and typically better) options. Harder modes are also longer and may exceed the playtime you want. So setting up an appropriate challenge might be painful.
It's also somewhat unfair as a one-shot exercise, because as you play you get access to new tiles that substantially alter the optimal layout, but you can't move your existing tiles and you can't see the late-game tiles in advance, so you can end up getting punished for having done a good job of optimizing the variables that you knew about. (Though conceivably this teaches something about flexibility?)
Lueur and the Dim Settlers
This game actually isn't even out yet, but there's a free demo. The demo is certainly too easy for your purposes. But it's a relatively short turn-based survival strategy game where exploration plays an important role. (Note: I have only a vague memory of how long this took to play.)
I think there were some simple action-based mini-games, too, so it's not pure strategy.
ETA Again: If unknown information is not such a priority, one could also look at some solo-friendly strategy board games--several of which have digital versions, such as Spirit Island, Aeon's End, or One Deck Dungeon.
Several thoughts occur, in relation to this list of criteria.
- Is 30-120 minutes supposed to be how long the game would take if you were playing normally, or if "you were taking a long time to think each turn or pausing a lot"? I'm a pretty thoughtful and methodical player in strategy games, and some genres of game seem to take me as much as 2-5x as long to play as they take for a typical player, so this can make quite a difference. (Though the upper end of that range may only apply if I'm actually pausing to take notes.)
- Are you looking for games where a typical player on their first play will lose, or where they will take longer to win than the given timeframe, or is either fine?
- With respect to "value of information", I usually make a distinction between learning gamestate and learning rules--for instance, in Poker, the first would be learning what cards someone has, while the second would be learning whether or not a straight beats a flush.
- Hidden gamestate generally has precise bounds for what it could be (if you already know the rules), but are generally made deliberately unguessable within those bounds. The rules of the game have no strict boundaries on what they could be, but usually aren't designed to be mysterious, and your ability to guess them may be extremely dependent on how much experience you have with similar games.
- It would be extremely unusual for a game to take into account how much a move reveals about the rules of the game when balancing them.
- Most modern video games are designed to teach you the rules during your first game (which may actually be an obstacle if you want an exercise where the rules are taken as known)
- My impression is that most games with exploration as a mechanic are optimized to deliver feelings of discovery, rather than interesting strategy around explore/exploit trade-offs.
- Any game where information is valuable, and where gathering less than the maximum amount of helpful information is a viable strategy, is a game with a significant amount of luck. (Since this implies you can gamble on unknown information at reasonable odds.) This means players who only play once will not have a reliable measurement of how well they actually played.
On a literal level, I can't play "a level I haven't played before", which is what the instructions call for.
On a practical level, I've already spent multiple hours beating my head against this wall, and when I stopped I had no remotely promising ideas for how to make further progress. (And most of that time was spent staring at the puzzle and thinking hard without interacting with it, so it was already kind of similar to this exercise.)
Admittedly, this was years ago, so maybe it's time to revisit the puzzle anyway.
I will note that a level editor for this game seems to exist, so in theory you could craft custom levels for this exercise. Though insofar as the point is being potentially-surprised by the rules, maybe that doesn't help if you aren't inventing new rules as well.
Baba Is You is an unusual puzzle game in a way that seems relevant here.
One way of classifying puzzle games might be on a continuum from logic-based to exploration-based (or, if you like, between logical uncertainty and environmental uncertainty).
At the first extreme you have stuff like Sudoku, or logic grids, or three gods named True, False, and Random, or blue eyes. In these puzzles, you are given all necessary information up-front, and you should (if the puzzle is well-constructed) be able to verify the solution entirely on your own, without requiring an external authority to confirm it.
At the opposite extreme, there's 20 questions or mastermind or Guess Who?, where the entire point is that necessary information is being withheld and you need to interact with the puzzle to expose it. Knowing all the information is the solution; there would be no point without the concealment.
Baba Is You is pretty close to the first extreme, but not all the way there. It does ask you learn the basic rules of the game by interacting with it, and it does gradually introduce new rules, but most of the difficulty comes from logical uncertainty. Some puzzles do not introduce new rules at all, or only introduce new rules in the sense of exploring the edge cases of a previously-established rule. It also makes the entire puzzle visible at once, so once you understand the rules it becomes a pure logic puzzle.
This exercise relies on the possibility of being empirically surprised, but also on being able to make fairly detailed plans in spite of that possibility. This seems like it requires (or at least heavily benefits from) being at a pretty narrow area within the logic <=> exploration continuum, which Baba Is You happens to be exactly situated at.
Most puzzle video games lean more heavily on exploration than that. You mentioned The Witness, which I would classify as primarily exploration-based: each series of puzzles centers around a secret rule that you need to infer through experimentation, and most puzzles are easy once you have figured out the secret rule. (The game Understand, mentioned by another commenter, has the same premise.)
Another puzzle game I recognize from the bundle you linked is Superliminal, which has the premise that you're inside a dream and solve puzzles using dream-logic. I'd also consider that heavily exploration-based.
The Talos Principle is much closer to Baba Is You's point on this continuum, with a relatively small number of rules and an emphasis on applying them creatively, although in The Talos Principle you can't always see the entire puzzle before you begin solving it, and I'd say the puzzle components' appearances are less suggestive of their functions than the adjectives in Baba Is You, probably making it significantly harder to guess how they'll behave without doing some experimentation.
Patrick's Parabox is similar to Baba Is You in that they are both Sokoban games, though I didn't play too far in Patrick's Parabox because the puzzles felt more workaday and less mind-bendy and I just got bored. (Though it's highly rated, so presumably most people didn't.)
Unless you've literally beaten the entire game, this exercise works if you play a level you haven't played before.
I haven't beaten every level in the game, but I don't have access to any levels that I haven't played before, because the reason I stopped playing was that I had already tried and failed every remaining available level.
(Though I suppose I could cheat and look up the solution for where I got stuck...)
Summarize the key concept of the solution
This might not apply to the early levels you've focused on in your examples, but an observation I made while playing the more advanced levels of this game was that often there was not just one key concept.
In most puzzle games that I've played, I find I can quickly get a sort of feel for the general shape of the solution: I start here, I have to end up there, therefore there must be a step in the middle that bridges those two. This often narrows the possible search space quite a lot, because the missing link has to touch the parts I know about at both the beginning and the end.
Lots of puzzles in Baba Is You have two significant steps in the middle. And this is a huge jump in difficulty, because it means there's an intermediate state between those two steps and I have no idea what that intermediate state looks like so I can't use it to infer the shape of those steps. Each of the missing steps has only 1 constraint instead of 2.
You heavily implied that Roko had assigned that probability to that event, and that implication is false.
I'm trying to get better at noticing when the topic of a conversation has drifted, so that I don't unwittingly feel pressured to defend a position that is stronger, or broader, or just different, from what I was trying to say.
I was originally trying to say: When you said Roko's number implied he thought people in Wuhan were less likely than the global average to be patient zero in a pandemic, I think that was an important misrepresentation of Roko's actual argument.
I notice that we no longer seem to be discussing that, or anything that could plausibly change anyone's opinion on that. So I'm going to stop here.
(I'm not necessarily claiming this is the first point in this conversation where I could have noticed this. Like I said, trying to get better.)
I did see this, but didn't find it convincing. China has become substantially more urban, more interconnected, more populous, and more connected to the outside world even over the past 10 or 20 years. A claim like this requires substantially more thorough analysis.
Your first comment seemed to take the position that the OP's number was not merely different from yours, but indefensible, and you gave a lower bound for a defensible prior that was 1.4x higher than the number you were complaining about.
I feel like you have softened your position to the point where it no longer supports your original comment (from "timing is not even a consideration" to "this timing argument is less thorough than I think it ought to be"). If this is because you changed your mind, great! If not, then I'm confused about how these comments are meant to be squared.
Are you claiming the timing argument is so weak that no reasonable person could possibly estimate its Bayes factor as >1.4? I don't feel like you've come close to justifying a claim like that.
And, again, is it reasonable to start researching and make COVID in the ~2 year time window given?
I have no idea! What's your 90% CI for how long it would take them, and what evidence are you relying on for that?
I think that whatever the next pandemic out of Southern or Central China or Southeast Asia is, the WIV (or some other lab in the region) is extremely likely to have a sample of a related virus and studied it.
I previously thought you were claiming "the unconditional probability of a naturally-occurring pandemic to be a bat coronavirus is ~1". This claim differs from that in several ways. Thank you for clarifying!
Making the probability conditional on location of origin: Absolutely fair, we already accounted for the improbability of the location. I missed this.
On the category of the disease we are matching: "bat coronavirus" may be too narrow (though I got that phrase from you), but "have a sample and have studied it" seems too broad. What's your probability if we change that to "are currently performing gain-of-function research on it"?
(I also notice your claim is phrased such that it presumes any pandemic will be caused by a virus, but I'm assuming that was accidental and your claim generalizes to all vectors.)
I'm somewhat surprised that you're so skeptical of this; I don't think anyone was ever in doubt that bat coronaviruses spilling into humans in Southeast Asia this part of China has been considered a likely problem for a long time.
"This is likely to happen" and "there's approximately a 100% chance that the very next problem in this general category will be this" are not the same, and are not close to being the same.
The timing is given by such a weak argument that I did ignore it, yes. WIV has been studying bat coronaviruses for years, and probably will continue to do so for years, and the only thing to tie it so closely in time is a rejected grant proposal that emphasized having the actual work done at UNC.
This was in a section of the OP marked as an edit, so it's possible this level of detail wasn't there the first time you looked:
We must also account for the timing here. Each year in the modern period from, say, 1970 until today has a decently large chance of human-animal transmission, perhaps with some bias towards the present due to more travel. But gain of function is a new invention - it only really started in 2011 and funding was banned in 2014, then the moratorium was lifted in 2017. The 2011-2014 period had little or no coronavirus gain of function work as far as I am aware. So coronavirus gain of function from a lab could only have occurred after say 2010 and was most likely after 2017 when it had the combination of technology and funding. This is a period of about 2 years out of the entire 1920-2020 hundred-year window. Now, we could probably discount that hundred year window down to say an equivalent of 40 years as people have become more mobile and more numerous in China over the past 100 years, on average. But that is still something like a 1 in 20 chance that the worst coronavirus pandemic of the past hundred years happened in the exact 2-year window when gain of function research was happening most aggressively, and that is independent from the location coincidence.
Note this reasoning does not rely on the grant proposal.
"What kind of disease" has Bayes Factor 1.
You appear to have more knowledge of virology than I do, but this is far too implausible (on my model) for me to believe it merely because you declared it. I've heard of many plagues that were not bat coronaviruses. Your prior on the next naturally-occurring pandemic being a bat coronavirus cannot plausibly be ~100% unless you know some hitherto-unmentioned information that would be very startling to me.
Wuhan is a city of 11 million people; the world population is about 7.9 billion. Saying that the prior on a zoonotic origin is anything less than 11 million / 7.9 billion = 1.4/1000 means that you think people living in Wuhan are less likely to be patient 0 than the average person in the entire world.
The odds given in the OP are based on 3 coincidences:
- Location
- Timing
- What kind of disease it was
Your number is only based on 1 of those coincidences (location). It is not surprising that the probability of one of those things is higher than the probability of all 3 at once.
Are "switchy" and "streaky" accepted terms-of-art? I wasn't previously familiar with them and my attempts to Google them mostly lead back to this exact paper, which makes me think this paper probably coined them.
This seems like a difficult situation because they need to refer to the particular way-of-betting that they are talking about, and the common name for that way-of-betting is "the gambler's fallacy", and so they can't avoid the implication that this way-of-betting is based on fallacious reasoning except by identifying the way-of-betting in some less-recognizable way, which trades off against other principles of good communication.
I suppose they could insert the phrase "so-called". i.e. "Bayesians commit the so-called Gambler's Fallacy". (That still funges against the virtue of brevity, though not exorbitantly.)
What would you have titled this result?
These definitions seem like they only allow Alice to recognize agents that are "as strong as" Alice in the sense that Alice doesn't think she could improve on their decisions. For instance, Alice won't endorse Bob's chess moves if Alice can play chess better than Bob (even if Carol would endorse Bob's moves). Have I understood correctly?
Thanks for doing research!
Your link goes on to say:
To ensure that you are treating the LLC as a separate legal entity, the owners must:
- Avoid co-mingling assets . The LLC must have its own federal employer identification number and business-only checking account. An owner’s personal finances should never be included in the LLC’s accounting books. All business debts should be paid out of the LLC’s dedicated bank account.
- Act fairly. The LLC should make honest representations regarding the LLC’s finances to vendors, creditors or other interested parties.
- Operating Agreement. Have all the members executed a formal written operating agreement that sets forth the terms and conditions of the LLC’s existence.
I imagine the bite is in the "act fairly" part? That sounds distressingly like the judge just squints at your LLC and decides whether they think you're being reasonable.
Naive question: What stops a company from conducting all transactions through LLCs and using them as liability shields?
I'm imagining something like: Instead of me selling a car to Joe, I create a LLC, loan the LLC the money to buy a car, sell the car to the LLC for the loaned money, the LLC sells the car to Joe for the same price, uses Joe's money to repay the loan, leaving the LLC with zero assets, and no direct business relationship between me and Joe.
I imagine we must already have something that stops this from working, but I don't know what it is.
If you allow the provider of a product or service to contract away their liability, I predict in most cases they will create a standard form contract that they require all customers to sign that transfers 100% of the liability to the customer in ~all circumstances, which presumably defeats the purpose of assigning it to the provider in the first place.
Yes, customers could refuse to sign the contract. But if they were prepared to do that, why haven't they already demanded a contract in which the provider accepts liability (or provides insurance), and refused to do business without one? Based on my observations, in most cases, ~all customers sign the EULA, and the company won't even negotiate with anyone who objects because it's not worth the transaction costs.
Now, even if you allow negotiating liability away, it would still be meaningful to assign the provider liability for harm to third parties, since the provider can't force third parties to sign a form contract (they will still transfer that liability to the customer, but this leaves the provider as second-in-line to pay, if the customer isn't caught or can't pay). So this would matter if you're selling the train that the customer is going to drive past a flammable field like in the OP's example. But if you're going to allow this in the hospital example, I think the hospital doesn't end up keeping any of the liability John was trying to assign them, and maybe even gets rid of all of their current malpractice liability too.
Who should be second in line for liability (when the actual culprit isn't caught or can't pay) is a more debatable question, I think, but I still do not see any clear reason for a default of assigning it to the product manufacturer.
Your principle 3 says we should assign liability to whoever can most cheaply prevent the problem. My model says that will sometimes be the manufacturer, but will more often be the victim, because they're much closer to the actual harm. For instance, it's cheaper to put your valuable heirloom into a vault than it is to manufacture a backpack that is incapable of transporting stolen heirlooms. Also consider what happens if more than one product was involved; perhaps the thief also wore shoes!
My model also predicts that in many cases both the manufacturer and the victim will have economically-worthwhile mitigations that we'd ideally like them to perform. I think the standard accepted way of handling situations like that is to attempt to create a list of mitigations that we believe are reasonable for the manufacturer to perform, then presume the manufacturer is blameless if they did those, but give them liability if they failed to do one that appears relevant. Yes, this is pretty much what you complained about in your malpractice example. Our "list of reasonable mitigations" will probably not actually be economically optimal, which adds inefficiency, but plausibly less inefficiency than if we applied strict liability to any single party (and thereby removed all incentive for the other parties to perform mitigations).