New Paper: “Program Equilibrium in the Prisoner’s Dilemma via Löb’s Theorem”

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robust cooperation first pageWe’ve released a new paper recently accepted to the MIPC workshop at AAAI-14: “Program Equilibrium in the Prisoner’s Dilemma via Löb’s Theorem” by LaVictoire et al. This paper is essentially a shortened version of Barasz et al. (2014). For the history of the key results therein, see Robust Cooperation: A Case Study in Friendly AI Research.

Abstract of the new paper:

Applications of game theory often neglect that real-world agents normally have some amount of out-of-band information about each other. We consider the limiting case of a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma between algorithms with read access to one anothers’ source code. Previous work has shown that cooperation is possible at a Nash equilibrium in this setting, but existing constructions require interacting agents to be identical or near-identical. We show that a natural class of agents are able to achieve mutual cooperation at Nash equilibrium without any prior coordination of this sort.