What is a good strategy for the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma when there is noise, a 5% chance that you...
decision/prisoners.dilemma New, unsolved
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Problem
What is a good strategy for the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma when there is noise, a 5% chance that you misperceive your opponent's last move? I (not so recently) took a strategy of games/negotiations class which started with a Prisoner's Dilemma tournament which had a twist: there was random noise included, so there was a 5% chance that you would think that your opponent defected last round when he really co-operated (or vice-versa). Tit-for-tat still did pretty well in this tournament, but sometimes got stuck in repeated defect-cooperate-defect-cooperate cycles when playing against a similar strategy and "thinking" that the opponent defected. Tit-for-two tats did a bit better, as did my strategy of playing tit-for-tat but throwing in a random cooperate every once in a while to get out of cycles (this was less prone to being taken advantage of by the strategies that threw in random defects every once in a while to try to get some extra points). Can anyone else come up with a better strategy? -- Daniel Mytelka <mytelka@mendel.berkeley.edu> [ Editor: the first paragraph is the editor's summary. ]
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