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Games between Programs: The Ruliology of Competition
Hraness wrote this summary from a saved copy of the source. Quotations are taken word for word from the source.
gist
Stephen Wolfram treats repeated two-player competition as a ruliological survey of all possible strategies, modeled as programs—finite-state machines, cellular automata, and Turing machines—playing match-or-not and Prisoner’s Dilemma. Ranking every short program against every other shows that even simple strategies yield complicated win patterns: some exploit reducible hacks, others win only after irreducible runs, so competition does not reliably select for either complexity or simplicity.
ideas
- Strategies as an enumerable program space. Instead of hand-picked game-theory tactics, enumerate all small machines and let cumulative payoff rank them on multiway paths of past moves.
- Competition is typically irreducible. Knowing who wins often requires running the programs; Computational Equivalence suggests broad qualitative sameness, but details stay case-by-case.
- Wins can be hacks or hard-won. Some victors exploit simple regularities; others prevail only after both sides show complex behavior, sometimes via pockets of reducibility.
- Machine class and size reshape the tournament. Finite automata, cellular automata, and Turing machines, and mismatches in size, change which strategies dominate and how adaptive evolution climbs the space.
- Game payoff tables are another axis. Beyond match-or-not, Prisoner’s Dilemma and the space of all 2×2 games alter which programs look “winning” under the same enumeration.
quotes
“what happens if one systematically considers all possible strategies”
“And if we think of strategies as programs this becomes a question to which we can immediately apply ruliological methods”
“The Principle of Computational Equivalence suggests that there’ll be a certain universality to the overall results”
“to know how competitions between programs will work out, there’s basically no choice but to run them and see what happens”