Peeve Farm

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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

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Saturday, February 23, 2002
01:48 - Tit-for-Tat http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/02/fog0000000350.shtml	(top)
I mentioned this Game Theory post by Steven den Beste a few days ago, but today I thought about it a little more. (And no, I still haven't seen A Beautiful Mind. Tomorrow, probably. After I take care of those boxes.) Specifically, I was considering the "tit-for-tat" model of playing the Prisoner's Dilemma game: you do what the other guy did in the last round. So you play fair until he cheats, at which point you cheat, and if he plays fair, then you're back on track. This model is not ideal, but it's been demonstrated to be the most effective one available-- and so it's the method upon which the nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction contingency and the Geneva Convention are constructed. When Tit-for-tat plays against itself, it plays fair for the entire game and maximizes output. When it plays against anyone who tosses in some cheating, it punishes it by cheating back and reduces the other guys unfair winnings. No-one has ever found a way of defeating it. Maybe not. Except in the Real World. Consider this hypothetical situation: Two adversaries playing tit-for-tat. Everything goes along fine forever, nobody cheats. Except then you inject one cheating round on one side: One guy cheats. And his opponent then cheats in retaliation. The first guy returns to tit-for-tat-- and he cheats. So does his adversary. And now everybody's cheating, and it's a cycle that will not be broken until a second injection is made: a voluntary "play fair" round that one guy decides to do, just out of the goodness of his heart (because surely there's no rational reason to do it). But that's the only way to get both sides to play fair again. It strikes me that this model is a lot closer to how the Real World works. We all sort of instinctually follow the tit-for-tat rules; by our nature we try to avoid confrontation if we can avoid it, especially if we're in large organizations. We won't soil our own nest by being needlessly mistrustful; but we'll react if we're threatened. But human interactions are very complex, especially in large organizations; they involve lots of misconstruable shades of meaning, and lots of rationalizing and self-assuredness-- including the concept of "I do this for the greater good". And when a country makes a decision to undertake some back-door ploy, or to cut a third-party deal, or to do anything that isn't out in the open and done by the rules agreed to by the adversary, the game has had that first cheat injected into it. Once the adversary finds out about it, he cheats back-- and then the two opponents are locked into a cycle of mistrust and constant cheating, unbreakable except by a good-faith act by one of the adversaries who does it regardless of whether it makes any financial or political sense to do it. This is where the US and the Soviet Union were throughout the Cold War. Who was the first to inject the first seed of mistrust into the game? Nobody really knows. But the result was clear: neither side trusted the other to play by the rules. We always assumed they knew more than they were telling us, and they assumed the same of us; we always assumed they were readying some sneaky move against us, and they assumed the same of us. And yet both sides knew that tit-for-tat was still the best model for handling the game, and so we kept using it-- continuing to distrust, until the good-faith motions on the part of Gorbachev's moribund USSR injected the solution into the game, leading to the collapse of that country and its superpower status, and also of the Cold War and the large part of our long-standing policy of mistrust. Tit-for-tat does remain the most effective policy, it's true-- but only in an ideal world, where both sides follow that model and no cheating ever occurs, or where a tit-for-tat player plays against a randomized player (where no pattern forms based on feedback injected back into the system by the game's results). But neither of those conditions accurately describes the Real World, in which everybody plays by tit-for-tat on the surface, but where we always keep the possibility of spontaneously cheating open... and where human nuance leads to a real or imagined cheat finding its way into even the most well-intentioned game. And then follows forty years of bristling and glowering and waiting for someone to make a move. Hardly what I'd call "maximized output" or "ideal"... but for human nature, that's what we can expect.