Let's invent a new game!

It all started as all good things start these days : on irc.i

cads Hey guys, are you familiar with the multi-armed bandit problem?

mircea_popescu Yes.

moiety I thought most bandits had multiple arms.

mircea_popescu It's a formulation of the explore/exploit dilemma.

cads moiety: A one armed bandit is a slot machine, while the multi-armed bandit problem considers the best play in a situation with multiple slot machines with uncertain odds.

mircea_popescu Like suppose you're naked outdoors circa 4500 bc, and very hungry. You find a bush with berries. How long do you spend grazing and when do you leave looking for more bushes ?

moiety When you have collected them all from the first.

mircea_popescu Yes well, it gets more complicated than that.

moiety I know sorry I couldn't resist.

mircea_popescu God forbid someone marries you.

moiety I think we can all safely assume thats not going to happen.

mircea_popescu Attn all present JPM bankers: the girl won't leave till she's bled you dry!

moiety LOL!

mircea_popescu heheii.

asciilifeform Re: multi-armed bandit: http://lalandlab.st-andrews.ac.uk/tournaments/tournament1/sociallearning.html This is old news; 2nd tournament is mostly done now, too.

mircea_popescu Basically the appeal of Civ was exactly this.

asciilifeform Contest inspired by Axelrod's prisoner's dilemma tournament.

mircea_popescu You know this inspires me ? One could formalise the problem with strings.

asciilifeform They sorta did.

moiety That's just along the road from me!

mircea_popescu Hear me out : you define actual words in the dictionary as "good stuff", and each player gets a selection of poems to complete. Words themselves are worth points, filled lines are worth more points, filled poems even more. Then you give everyone strings, and they can read one char at a time for a cost. Or skip the string, for a larger cost. Obviously player can only eat a word if the whole word has been read.

asciilifeform This sound like fun, but the contest was a robot-writing one rather than between players directly. The final reports are worth reading.

mircea_popescu Yes yes! You have to write the scripts for this, I was just describing what your bot is supposed to do. Well not your "your". One's.

asciilifeform What's the goal? To reproduce the poem before the other players?

mircea_popescu Get most moneyz. The key here, of course, being that the strings are not all created equal. Each string has its own per-character entropy, from epsilon to 8-epsilon.

asciilifeform 'Read one character at a time'

Thursday, 20 February, Year 6 d.Tr.