Redpill Prisoner's Dilemma - Beta

-Collbard-

Come one, come all! Think you've got the Strength and Strategy to win the Redpill Prisoner's Delimma? Sign up! The rules may sound complicated at first, but you'll quickly get the hang of it! The more who sign up, the greater the experience will be!

Redpill Prisoner's Dilemma is modified somewhat from the typical Prisoner's Dilemma in order to make things more interesting. Will you chose to cooperate or betray?! The rules are as follows:

Participants have one week to sign up (until March 27). Either give your handle by responding to this thread, sending me a PM, sending me and in-Matrix email, or contacting me within the Matrix. In order to keep an air of secrecy, the contestants will not be listed until after the first round has been completed. Rounds will be completed as follows:

Once all contestants are signed up I will randomly pair them off with one another. Contestants will not know who they are paired with. At the soonest time that I and two paired contestants are within the Matrix and available I will contact each of them simultaneously. I will then ask them the vital question, "Cooperate or Betray?" Once I have received an answer from both contestants I will disclose to each of them a location for us all to meet. Scoring is as follows:

Contest 1: If contestants A and B answer (respectively) , "Cooperate-Cooperate," neither contestant will gain a point. If contestants answer, "Cooperate-Betray," contestant B will gain a point. If contestants answer, "Betray-Cooperate," contestant ! will gain a point. If contestants answer, "Betray-Betray," the players will begin a battle as soon as I have given there results. The winner of the battle will receive a point.

Contest 2: At this point either one contestant has received a point or both contestants have cooperated and no point has been given. The contestants, now face to face, have the opportunity to briefly discuss negotiations if they wish, or, the contest will continue. Again, I will privately ask both contestants "Cooperate or Betray?" then reveal the results of their answer. Scoring will proceed as mentioned above.

Contest 3: At this point there are several score possibilities; contest 3 will be the last unless there is a tie (see below). Again, a brief discussion between contestants will be allowed, I will ask "Cooperate or Betray" privately to both contestants, reveal the result and give points where due. At this point the contestant with the most points will be declared the victor and will move onto the next round. Ties will be determined as follows:

If both players have acted cooperatively throughout all three contests, both players move onto the next round! In any other circumstance, a Final Contest will be held, conducted the same as the others; however, if both players cooperate in the Final Contest, they will both move on and if one contestant gains a point advantage over the other, he/she will move on.

Once all contestants have completed a round I will post the results in this thread. Round two will begin in the same way Round one did. I will randomly partner up the remaining contestants. Should the case arise that there is an odd number of contestants, one contestant (again randomly chosen) will advance to the next round automatically.

The rounds will continue until there is only one contestant remaining (the victor) or until there is a stalemate between remaining contestants. A stalemate occurs if all remaining contestants choose to cooperate with one another. On the very last round (that will determine a stalemate) I will inform contestants that a stalemate is looming before asking them "Cooperate or Betray?"

The clear victor will receive the full prize amount. In the case of a Stalemate, all remaining contestants will split the prize amount.

Beta: As the title of this thread says, this event is a Beta. I have never conducted anything like this before and I'm not sure exactly how well it will work; however, I've spent a considerable amount of time crafting the rules. I don't want to devote an excessive amount of $info towards a prize without being sure that I can successfully pull off this event. The prize for this event will be 10 Million $info. If this operation works well I will create an official version and offer much greater prizes (including prizes for advancing each round). If you have any questions/constructive criticisms feel free to post them.

-Collbard-

Wow...I thought people would find this fun, or at least interesting. It is a break from typical pvp tournaments. Really, no one is interested? Why not exactly?

**Bayamos**

Hmm, funny thing. I just finished writing a paper on Prisoner's Dilemna as well as Stag Hunt and the other game theory scenarios.

It'd be certainly interesting to see what people did here. The Betray-Betray PVP element sounds like a great idea.

PD normally is where T > R > P > S. In this case, T > R=P=S, except at the end of stage 3, R = T.

I'd certainly be interested in this, although I wish it hadn't been named Prisoner's Dilemna -- if you just mask it as a contest and people don't realize it's PD, that's one thing. But when they know it's PD, and the event is set up through a definite rather than indefinite integral, the only dominant strategy becomes obvious.

**Omega0**

I had never heard of Prisoner's Dilemma before seeing this post. I read through it, and as far as I can tell, there is no incentive to Cooperate. I would just go with Betray every single time, which seems like it would get boring pretty quickly. That's why I'm not interested.

-Collbard-

Well the "Always Betray" strategy is the most obvious, but in many cases is not shown to be the most effective strategy. Another problem I encountered while constructing this is that, as mentioned, the rounds are definite. I guess if I could add a greater incentive to cooperate and less of one to betray it would be nice, but then everyone might just cooperate. I did design this with several scenarios in mind though, so that after the initial meeting players could choose to cooperate or betray without the first round preventing a complete coop-coop win. Do you think there would be a greater incentive to cooperate if a prize were given to each player for passing into the next round, but no prize given for betrayal? I had actually intended to do this, but I just wanted to run a beta version to see what strategies players would generally use.

I still plan to run this so sign up if you want to give it a try. You've got nothing to lose!

-Collbard-

Cool, no one signed up. Well thats the first and likely last time I try to do something different and fun for the community.