| Placed in the "Women for War" note just because that's where this
thread turned up while I was <Enter>ing my way through... I'm also
writing this from somewhat old memories so I'm sure someone will
be happy to supply all the corrections and amplifications necessary.
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In support of .1 and .2, there was an interesting series of arti-
cles in "Scientific American" a ways back exploring "The Prisoner's
Dilemna" and other related things. One of the related things was
the general question of "how should party 2 respond to party 1 if
party 2 is trying to maximize their own benefit from the interaction?"
(As I recall, when it all worked out, how party 2 should reply
didn't depend much on what party 1's motives were, although the
overall outcome (the overall success) was strongly dependent upon
both parties being motivated towards the best mutual outcome.)
That's a stilted way of putting it. A few concrete examples might
be:
o We're business associates. Either of us can make a good
short-term profit by screwing the other on the next deal.
Is that a tactic that will maximize my long-term profit?
o We're neighboring countries of nominally equal strength.
A attacks B; How should B respond to maximize its long
term prospects?
Now, many, many different strategies were proposed and set against
each other in computer models. (Various probabilities of outcomes
were assigned as a sensitivity analysis.) It turns out that one
of the best general-purpose strategies is "Tit-for-tat". Whatever
you do to me on your "turn", I do to you *ONCE* on my "turn".
So, as long as we're business associates and *NOT* screwing each
other, we keep dealing honestly. If you screw me on a deal, I do
it once in retaliation and you, a rational opponent stop doing it.
If you attack a bit of my country, I fight back in approximately
equal retaliation.
All kinds of opposing strategies were tried ranging all the way
from passivism to the computer equivalent of "You touch me I
permanently break your face." In many individual encounters
in nearly all free-for-all encounters, the computer entity(ies)
using the Tit-for-Tat strategy ended up at the top of the heap.
(Obviously, even being at the top of the heap wasn't very good
if an opponent was playing using a strategy like "If you so much
as insult me I'll vaporize the entire planet with thermonuclear
weapons.)
Atlant
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