The Darwin Game — LessWrong
For the grand finale, and to determine the winner of the prestigious Golden Shark Award for best overall performance, we submitted computer program architectures (we’d tell the professor what our program did, within reason, and he’d code it for us) to play The Darwin Game. The Darwin Game is a variation slash extension of the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. It works like this: For the first round, each player gets 100 copies of their program in the pool, and the pool pairs those programs at random. You can and often will play against yourself. Each pair now plays an iterated prisoner’s dilemma variation, as follows. Each turn, each player simultaneously submits a number from 0 to 5. If the two numbers add up to 5 or less, both players earn points equal to their number. If the two numbers add up to 6 or more, neither player gets points. This game then lasts for a large but unknown number of turns, so no one knows when the game is about to end; for us this turned out to be 102 turns. Each p