Quote:
Originally Posted by river_tilt
You can pull the lever multiple times. It's the trolley problem version of the Collatz conjecture.
That connection is evident immediately but i still have no clue how the game is played to be honest. The entire thing depends on all kinds of unknown distributions. What do you see, when etc. Seriously i have absolutely no idea how its is played the way they presented it. This is mostly because i refuse to assume anything that is not clear in their presentation.
What do we have really? Is there an example of exact numbers and how it was played?
Do you have 1 person vs n and other times k vs m both >1 and then it bifurcates and you can select again but what do you know when you make the first decision about all future branches?
If i at least assume that when its 1 it becomes 3+1=4 then you select the smaller between the 2 final outcomes in each branch. Eg if it was 4 vs 1 you select the 4 because only 2 will die (divided by 2) vs the alternative of going to 1 becoming 3+1 and losing all 4? Am i understanding it? (hence my ????).
Then of course it all depends on how they are distributed overall because an initially good idea may turn bad if the later branches are such that they are worse even if optimally selected than another branch sector that would have been followed if you had taken the worse first choice the first time because it gets better later on that direction of future branches...
So how can you answer anything here without knowing the distribution of numbers or the exact numbers of all in advance? I am not even sure if the example i gave above (4 vs 1) is how they meant it.