In the last post, we talked about strategic time and the strategic time loops studied in open-source game theory. In that context, agents have logical line-of-sight to each other and the situation they're both facing, which creates a two-way information flow at the time each is making their decision. In this post I'll describe how agents in one context can use this logical line-of-sight to condition their behavior on how they behave in other contexts. This in turn makes those contexts strategically sequential or loopy, in a way that a purely causal decision theory doesn't pick up on.

Sequential Games and Leverage

As an intuition pump, consider the following ordinary game: Alice and Bob are going to play a Prisoners' Dilemma, and then an Ultimatum game. My favorite framing of the Prisoners' Dilemma is by Nicky Case: each player stands in front of a machine which accepts a certain [...]

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Outline:

(00:39) Sequential Games and Leverage

(03:43) Bets vs Unexploitability

(06:47) Counterfactual Games and Leverage

(10:48) Collateral as a Type of Leverage

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
January 19th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6nWhntKPtCFm8LFo6/logical-line-of-sight-makes-games-sequential-or-loopy

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Logical Line-Of-Sight Makes Games Sequential or Loopy” by StrivingForLegibility

LessWrong (30+ Karma)