One thing I don’t understand about cycles is that they seem fine as long as you have a generalized cycle detector and a single instance of a cycle getting generated is fine because the losses from one (or a few) rounds is small. I guess people think of utility functions as fixed normally, but this sort of rolls in fixed point/convergence intuitions into the problem formulation.
One frame is that utility functions as a formalism are just an extension of the great rationality debate.
If we have a cycle detector which prevents cycling, then we don’t have true cycles. Indeed, that would be an example of a system with internal state: the externally-visible state looks like it cycles, but the full state never does—the state of the cycle detector changes.
So this post, as applied to cycle-detectors, says: any system which detects cycles and prevents further cycling can be represented by a committee of utility-maximizing agents.
One thing I don’t understand about cycles is that they seem fine as long as you have a generalized cycle detector and a single instance of a cycle getting generated is fine because the losses from one (or a few) rounds is small. I guess people think of utility functions as fixed normally, but this sort of rolls in fixed point/convergence intuitions into the problem formulation.
One frame is that utility functions as a formalism are just an extension of the great rationality debate.
If we have a cycle detector which prevents cycling, then we don’t have true cycles. Indeed, that would be an example of a system with internal state: the externally-visible state looks like it cycles, but the full state never does—the state of the cycle detector changes.
So this post, as applied to cycle-detectors, says: any system which detects cycles and prevents further cycling can be represented by a committee of utility-maximizing agents.