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#gametheory

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📣 Call for Abstracts: "Technology assessment and future warfare: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly".

The Special topic of issue 35/1 (2026) is guest edited by
Prof. Dr. Karsten Weber and Prof. Dr. Markus Bresinsky, OTH Regensburg, DE

📅 Submit your abstract by: 11 April 2025

Further information:
lnkd.in/g7gxBh2V

#FutureWarfare, #GameTheory, #NuclearWar, #CyberWeapons, #AutonomousWeapons, #DualUse
#Zeitenwende, #TechnologyAssessment, #TAJournal

oekom Verlag
@ITAS_KIT

lnkd.inLinkedInThis link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

The Axelrod library is 10 years old.

If I'd had time to see that coming I'd have written down some thoughts about it all. Here are two simple thoughts:

For a library that started as a demo project at @PyConNA, it's ended up being a huge part of my research and teaching.

I've also learnt so much from the amazing co-maintainers of the project who have become friends.

axelrod.readthedocs.io

axelrod.readthedocs.ioWelcome to the documentation for the Axelrod Python library — Axelrod 4.13.1 documentation

"To promote human safety, AIs should be given the basic private law rights already enjoyed by other non-human agents, like corporations. AIs should be empowered to make contracts, hold property, and bring tort claims. Granting these rights would enable humans and AIs to engage in iterated, small-scale, mutually-beneficial transactions. This, we show, changes humans’ and AIs’ optimal game-theoretic strategies, encouraging a peaceful strategic equilibrium."

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf
#ai #gametheory

papers.ssrn.comAI Rights for Human Safety<div> AI companies are racing to create artificial general intelligence, or “AGI.” If they succeed, the result will be human-level AI systems that can independ
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@jon I very, very, very much recommend playing "The evolution of trust" (link below) which shows (with game theory) that a certain amount of forgiveness towards errors (or opposing viewpoints) of the other side is a winning strategy, whereas screwing people over is a losing strategy. Everyone, it's Sunday, play it.

ncase.me/trust/

ncase.meThe Evolution of Trustan interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other

There are some topics that just instantly generate endless debate. The Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Physics is one.

In RPGs, D&D and such, I think the equivalent topic is Referee, DM objectivity and the use of dice. This article by Bob Kruger describes the issue a little better than I have been able to describe it in the past (and I have tried to explain it so many times without much success).

web.archive.org/web/2016052012

web.archive.orgDo Dungeon Masters Roll Magic Dice? by Bob Kruger - Baen BooksBaen's eBook marketplace. eBooks with no DRM in every major format--for the Kindle, iPad, Nook, and more.
#dnd#rpg#osr

After running his original 2 tournaments Robert Axelrod concluded with a list of 5 properties for good performance in iterated Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments.

Over the Christmas period my co-authors and I published a paper where we analysed more than 45,000 tournaments to come up with more precise (and I'd argue correct) properties: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol

journals.plos.orgProperties of winning Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma strategiesAuthor summary In 1980, political scientist Robert Axelrod ran one of the most famous computer tournaments of the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD). The winner? The now-famous strategy, Tit for Tat. Axelrod attributed its success to simple properties such as: do not be envious, avoid being the first to defect, and do not be overly clever. Yet the tournament design, using only a small, selected set of strategies, not including random noise, and having fixed game lengths, raises questions about the generalizability of these results. Many researchers have continued to make similar assumptions in their own IPD experiments, limiting the insights that can be applied to more complex, realistic settings. In our study, we address these limitations by analyzing the performance of a large and diverse collection of IPD strategies across thousands of computer tournaments. We find that, while no single strategy consistently excels, successful strategies share key characteristics: they are nice, provocable and generous, a little envious, clever, and adapt to the environment. More precisely, strategies perform best when their probability of cooperation matches the total tournament population’s aggregate cooperation probabilities.

In the mid 80s, TSR came out with a new version of Top Secret. The original game was set more in a cold war USA vs USSR kind of setting. The newer game leaned more into a James Bond fantastical kind of setting.

I played it a couple of times. I really liked the combat of the game. Each character had a paper doll with hit locations and hit boxes. Players would roll 2 ten sided dice to see if they hit. 2 ten siders can make 00-99. If you rolled under your skill rating, you would get a hit.

But what was cool was that the same roll also told you how much damage you did, and where you hit. If Suzie had a Melee score of 67, and she rolled 58. She would do 5 points of damage and hit location 8 (right let). If she rolled a 20, she would do 2 points of damage and hit location 0 (head). If she rolled 78, she missed.

I always wanted to try such a system in a medieval style rpg, but damage and body types are more varied. I did not relish the idea of making paper dolls for Dragons, Centaurs, and Mermaids.

#rpg#spy#osr

Recent discussions about hypothetical D&D economies led me to look into Roman currency. Here is a great wikipedia image of the common currency in the 27 BC - 100 AD Roman era.

So instead of copper, silver, electrum gold (the D&D standard), the early Roman Empire used various iterations of Bronze, Orichalcum, Silver, Billon, and Gold.

And today I learned Billon is the name for an alloy of silver and gold, or silver and copper, or silver and gold and copper, or basically any alloy of silver and some base metal.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cu

#dnd#rpg#osr