My guess is in a story, the thinkers would win because the difficulty of the problem was vastly reduced compared to the real problem. One of the nice things is we can reliably assume it will discover the human mind space and that it is infinitely stable under optimization pressure. This alone basically nearly solves the problem of aligning it, since in real life there is a vast design space and the hard part of alignment is pointing to any values at all, not which values to value.
My guess is in a story, the thinkers would win because the difficulty of the problem was vastly reduced compared to the real problem. One of the nice things is we can reliably assume it will discover the human mind space and that it is infinitely stable under optimization pressure. This alone basically nearly solves the problem of aligning it, since in real life there is a vast design space and the hard part of alignment is pointing to any values at all, not which values to value.