{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"The Early Christian Strategy","description":"In 1980, game theorist Robert Axelrod ran a famous Iterated Prisoner\u2019s Dilemma Tournament. He asked other game theorists to send in their best strategies in the form of \u201cbots\u201d, short pieces of code that took an opponent\u2019s actions as input and returned one of the classic Prisoner\u2019s Dilemma outputs of COOPERATE or DEFECT. For example, you might have a bot that COOPERATES a random 80% of the time, but DEFECTS against another bot that plays DEFECT more than 20% of the time, except on the last round, where it always DEFECTS, or if its opponent plays DEFECT in response to COOPERATE. In the \u201ctournament\u201d, each bot \u201cencountered\u201d other bots at random for a hundred rounds of Prisoners\u2019 Dilemma; after all the bots had finished their matches, the strategy with the highest total utility won. To everyone\u2019s surprise, the winner was a super-simple strategy called TIT-FOR-TAT: https:\/\/readscottalexander.com\/posts\/acx-the-early-christian-strategy  ","author_name":"Astral Codex Ten Podcast","author_url":"http:\/\/sscpodcast.libsyn.com\/website","html":"