Collective Intelligence

For example, the "iocane powder" algorithm - which won the RSP tournament - combined the results of multiple different prediction algorithms, and then chose the play of the algorithm that had previously produced the best overall results. It contained a random algorithm to act as a fall-back. This was an attempt at a defense against any other program cracking its other algorithms.

In our matching pennies tournaments, similar aggregation techniques have been used to combine the estimates of other algorithms - in the hope of taking advantage of the principle of collective intelligence.

Another possibility is voting algorithms - which weigh the opinions of the algorithms, according to how successful they have been in the past, and then use a weighted combination of their choices to decide which move to make.

Minsky once proposed that minds worked like societies, with multiple different sub-agents playing different roles.

One hope for the matching pennies tournaments is that they can be used to explore the possible algorithms of collective intelligence - and help to decide which ones are the most effective.