I think it’s unfair to call my strategy (N) Not Nice. There were 15 strategies that would cooperate with a cooperation rock. I just didn’t expect anyone to enter permanent revenge mode after so much as a single defection. If there hadn’t been any such strategies, or if they had been outnumbered by cooperation rocks, or if there had been enough other testing bots to quickly drive them to extinction I think I would have won the evolutionary tournament.
In my experience, sending out a probe is riskier than it looks, and the only reason to do so is if you have strong reason to believe a pure-C player is in the field.
“NiceBot” is just a label, a shorthand way to refer to those 15 strategies (which notably were the only 15 survivors in the evolutionary tournament). I agree that it’s not a very precise name. Another way to identify them is that they’re the strategies that never defected first, outside the endgame. Your strategy was designed to defect first, in an attempt to exploit overly-cooperative strategies. Perhaps we could call the 15 the non-exploitative bots (although that’s not perfect either, since some bots like P and Z defect first in ways that aren’t really attempts to exploit their opponent).
I think it’s unfair to call my strategy (N) Not Nice. There were 15 strategies that would cooperate with a cooperation rock. I just didn’t expect anyone to enter permanent revenge mode after so much as a single defection. If there hadn’t been any such strategies, or if they had been outnumbered by cooperation rocks, or if there had been enough other testing bots to quickly drive them to extinction I think I would have won the evolutionary tournament.
In my experience, sending out a probe is riskier than it looks, and the only reason to do so is if you have strong reason to believe a pure-C player is in the field.
“NiceBot” is just a label, a shorthand way to refer to those 15 strategies (which notably were the only 15 survivors in the evolutionary tournament). I agree that it’s not a very precise name. Another way to identify them is that they’re the strategies that never defected first, outside the endgame. Your strategy was designed to defect first, in an attempt to exploit overly-cooperative strategies. Perhaps we could call the 15 the non-exploitative bots (although that’s not perfect either, since some bots like P and Z defect first in ways that aren’t really attempts to exploit their opponent).