Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Prisoner’s Dilema Tournament
Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Prisoner’s Dilema Tournament
We’ll be having a prisoner’s dilemma tournament! (We’ve done this in DC and it was pretty fun).
If you call me when you get to the lobby (301-458-0764) I can give you directions on how to get in. Feel free to show up late.
The tournament definitely made for an interesting game, but more as a conversation starter than a game itself. I suspect part of the issue was how short this particular game was, but the constant cooperation got old pretty quickly. Some ideas for next time someone wants to run a dilemma tournament:
1) Bracket play—you play with another person until one of you defects while the other cooperates. Example round: both cooperate, both cooperate both defect, both defect, player 1 defects and player 2 cooperates, player 1 moves on. This has a trivial vulnerability in that always defecting always wins or ties, so there’d have to be some other incentive to encourage cooperation.
2) Factions—each person is part of a faction, you have some minor term for the total utility of your faction at the end of the game. You could go further with this and have a negative (even more minor) term for the total utility of other factions, or maybe add the option of giving points to other players.
Unrelated note: In the future there should probably be some coordination around walking to/from. While nothing happened this time, Civic Center did not feel like the safest place to be walking around alone late at night.