Week 10 Tutorial: Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Tournament

The classic in-class tournament — submit a strategy, play it against everyone else's, repeatedly

1 May 2028

Before the tutorial#

Come with a strategy in mind: a rule for cooperate/defect against an unknown opponent, played repeatedly, that you could state in one sentence. “Be nice unless provoked, then get over it” is a perfectly legitimate one sentence.

In the tutorial#

Every strategy plays every other strategy across many rounds; totals are tallied live. Simple, forgiving strategies tend to outperform aggressive or overly clever ones — the point isn’t to guess the winner in advance, it’s to see the folk theorem produce a result instead of just stating one.

Afterwards#

Whatever won, ask what made it exploitable or not, and what that implies for how much a negotiated split (week 9) actually needs enforcement versus how much it enforces itself.

Printable handout#