🎓 Doc Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@qoto.org

#Litterbox now has an emoji picker and support for delete & redraft!

US court rules that Corellium is not infringing Apple’s copyrights with iOS virtual machines

https://9to5mac.com/2023/05/08/us-court-corellium-apple-ios/

@freemo

I think this is exactly the kind of reasoning described in wiki for why mixed strategies are a thing (see the choosing how to pitch in baseball example there).

The thing that might be interesting is also exploring what "optimal" means. For simplicity let's assume the game rules itself don't randomize anything and that the game has a binary outcome (A wins or B wins, no scoring).

In battleships, if each player was forced to be deterministic, for each strategy for player A there is a strategy for player B that defeats it and v.v. This means that the standard approach of "optimal strategy is one that wins whenever it's possible to win" would imply lack of optimal strategies at all: after all, it's always possible to win but no strategy wins always. This is still true if you admit nondeterministic strategies: it's possible to win against each deterministic strategy with p=1, but there's no strategy that does that for all deterministic counter-strategies.

The reasoning you described is similar to looking at changes you'd make in your strategy in response to knowing that opponent's, then doing the same for your opponent, and iterating this. So, it seems that you describe looking for a fixpoint of that: a pair of strategies s.t. neither you nor the opponent would want to change theirs upon learning what other player's strategy is. Note that this necessarily speaks about pairs of strategies (IIRC there are games where you have multiple such pairs, but I sadly don't recall examples). It's been shown that every game with finite sets of moves has at least one such pair.

NB if you are after such pairs of strategies, then instead of iterating it's often easier to directly look at the fixpoint condition and infer what such a pair of strategies would need to satisfy for both players not to wish to amend theirs.

@freemo I'm not an expert but it is probably a case of mixed strategy.

If you read the example in this page, it fits a lot of real-world cases:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_(game_theory)

@freemo The responses about mixed strategies are on-point mathematically/from a game theory perspective, but if you are talking about real-life scenarios (where no one really uses “optimal” strategies due to information constraints etc.) it might be convenient to use gaming terminology. In this case you could say you are “playing the meta[game]” – most people use a strategy currently considered very good and you find a strategy that might be bad in a vacuum, but counters the specific one everyone uses. Quite common in competitive e-sports, whether SC2 or Dota or whatnot.

@freemo Sounds like it's inconceivable!

@freemo So it seems!

https://qoto.org/@tripu/109800583585516619

@trinsec @freemo Well now all I can see is disco bender! 😂😂😂
"Bite my groovy metal ass!"

@freemo Looks like Bender going to a disco.

@freemo Woof, I’m technically a neoliberal and a conservative in the narrow academic polisci sense of these terms. Which of course means I can’t stand most of the things popularly done by folks who claim to be them.

@freepeoplesfreepress @freemo Strongly disagree. Companies are just collectives of people, and they have the right to free speech as well. On their property, they should be able to control the narrative and tone; that's their speech right. Just as it's our right to leave their property if we don't like the way they run things.

Free speech doesn't mean a right to compel others to host your speech.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Fediverse isn't just an American thing, and CDA 230 is only an American law.

That being said, people mistakenly think that CDA 230 protects platforms from the consequences of free speech that occurs on them, but that's not accurate: It protects platforms from the consequences of moderation, both by protecting them from liability for moderation and for protecting them from liability for failing to moderate.

Prior to CDA 230, two cases tested liability in the case of platforms mdoerating or not moderating their content.

CompuServe and Prodigy both offered online forums, but CompuServe chose not to moderate, while Prodigy did.

CompuServe was sued over content on their forums, and the case was dismissed. Prodigy, however, got in trouble. The judge in their case ruled that “they exercised editorial control — so you’re more like a newspaper than a newsstand,” Kosseff said.

I suspect that in many cases around the world the law would look the same, since it doesn't make sense to hold for example a 7-11 liable for the content of the newspapers they sell.