I broadly agree. As part of that mindset: often, even if you think you’ve played yourself into a hopeless situation where no sequence of moves could avoid a loss, you should still continue taking moves that keep you in the game for as long as possible. The longer the game goes on, the more chances there are for your doom to dispel itself. Your opponent may make a blunder, you may spot a path to victory you’d missed, some external event may perturb the gameboard, a miracle may happen. Cling to survival tenaciously, no matter how pointlessly stubborn it seems.
Necessary caveats:
In some cases, this advice should be reversed. Some games you should give up as lost the moment you lose hope, so that you can redistribute your resources across still-winnable games, rather than wasting them.
The real thing we’re aiming to maximize here is “the probability that the situation would stop being hopeless”. So, in theory, between the policy A that keeps you in the game for 10 moves but has a 0.1% chance of a miracle per move, and the policy B that loses the game in 1 move but has a 2% chance of a miracle, you should pick B. But in practice, the miracle probability is often correlated with the expected time to the loss, so this works as a heuristic for achieving this objective.
(Obvious AI-doom implications: extending the timelines to extinction makes sense even if we have no idea regarding what we could do with more time, even if we expect that time to be wasted.)
I broadly agree. As part of that mindset: often, even if you think you’ve played yourself into a hopeless situation where no sequence of moves could avoid a loss, you should still continue taking moves that keep you in the game for as long as possible. The longer the game goes on, the more chances there are for your doom to dispel itself. Your opponent may make a blunder, you may spot a path to victory you’d missed, some external event may perturb the gameboard, a miracle may happen. Cling to survival tenaciously, no matter how pointlessly stubborn it seems.
Necessary caveats:
In some cases, this advice should be reversed. Some games you should give up as lost the moment you lose hope, so that you can redistribute your resources across still-winnable games, rather than wasting them.
The real thing we’re aiming to maximize here is “the probability that the situation would stop being hopeless”. So, in theory, between the policy A that keeps you in the game for 10 moves but has a 0.1% chance of a miracle per move, and the policy B that loses the game in 1 move but has a 2% chance of a miracle, you should pick B. But in practice, the miracle probability is often correlated with the expected time to the loss, so this works as a heuristic for achieving this objective.
(Obvious AI-doom implications: extending the timelines to extinction makes sense even if we have no idea regarding what we could do with more time, even if we expect that time to be wasted.)