I have discussed Solved Games before and I have developed AI software that extends reasoning. In the case of board games or games in general it is generally assumed and I do accept that limited situations present limited options and the choices become irrelevant once the state is entered. In life, a person could be said to have a "Dead End Job" which seems to imply they have stepped into a state which for their circumstance and ability is a solved game and thus they no longer control their destiny or in this analogy, the perfect move already defined and it has no winning outcomes.
A solved game of life would be a very complex system, but many of the techniques that apply to game theory are adaptable to life. I have my AI programs take excursions in many areas and as a result they have given me a scenario which bubbled up due to its outcome weighting. People will create systems that favor their interests and this is reasonable. I would not likely choose the less effective of two equally weighted outcomes.
The movie "War Games" revolves around a premise that the game of nuclear war is a solved game, and in fact it is a fool's game to play. It seems that this game state evolved in natural course from existing circumstance and once the game is started it becomes one that ends in stalemate. This does not mean that giving up the game is a possible strategy. It is like any stand off of deadly force that is encountered.
Once a player is in a game that both players know will end in stalemate or failure of both participants, then it would seem that it would have no interest to a rational pair. It seems very much like the case of deadly embrace in computer systems.
If one or the other drops its state of request then the other wins / proceeds. It has been well studied and trillions of dollars have been spent on this and many other military situations which lead to this deadly embrace. Because life is not a game that we can walk away from, even a state of deadlock and waste is still greater than nothing or death.
What my AI has found is the resolution of this and as a result the people who have accepted this deadly embrace as a way of life would fail miserably and in this case it involves survivability. I did not create the game or devise the methods which leads to the deadlock as I was not even born when it began.
It seems to me that nations or organisms that stand at the ready with knives at each others throats would realize that a person who was observing this would know that if they both slipped, the observer would be the winner in the sense that they would kill each other and had they not been so stupid and insistent on a failed strategy they would not be in that position of vulnerability.
I saw a nature show the other day about monkeys and it was very similar. A piece of fruit accidentally landed in a hole in a tree. A starving monkey reached in to get it and once he had grabbed it, the hand and contents was too large to remove from the hole. Without some more elegant thought the monkey had two choices, grab the fruit and die or leave the fruit alone and die. The end result is that the monkey stayed there trying to remove the food until it died of starvation. A person might look for an ax or some other method to solve the problem, but the talents of the monkey were limited.
I am sure that a person would have a different response to that situation and creating such a trap is common for people to do to lower species. Thus the name "mouse trap". What many fail to realize, perhaps, is that mouse trapping or tricking people into entering a solved game scenario is very common in society and in the larger scope of the world.
So the world has its hand in the cookie jar and it can't figure out how to deal with that. As a result it dies waiting for the cookie and vultures live.
XKCD or his blog had a riddle about logic that I appreciated and it revolves about the concept of knowing. Something like: I know, I know you know, I know you know I know... It simply becomes nonsense to a person. I also like the (Collatz Conjecture) about the patterns, then didn't take his advise and extended it to Fibonacci numbers and other operational parameters and plotted them as three dimensional objects. It does not become nonsense to the AI. The result is that though I could not think in those twisty little passages all alike, the AI doesn't care if it is boring or seems to be a nonsense path to take. What is nonsense and impossible to resolve for a person is not the same for my AI. This I know for certain. I wonder if the outcome is already determined, and if nations stand pushing against each other until they collapse and die, would it be considered kindness to release them to immediate death and proceed without the oppressive weight of the constant pointless struggle?
Here is where the real riddle gets tricky. I could give a rat's ass for power or position and wouldn't act to resolve somebody's problem in this way. The twist comes when the computer knows it is a solved game and weighs A=1,000 and B=0 and then decides its action. The players in this game are not all subject to existential fear. The game is larger than the scope of who we wish to include and we do not control the playing field. Software is notoriously odd due to its advancing complexity and a scenario where a computer does something that we don't understand for reasons we cannot begin to encompass is certainly coming and it may seem that we control our destiny, but how many people find themselves trapped in a solved game or dominated strategy?
My mother had a solution for games of deadly embrace between my brother and I. It was very similar, you both lose if you can't cooperate and play nice. I think this is how the universe works also. Mommy Nature is a bit more drastic in her punishment and the systems that lock in deadly embrace die due to the relative expression levels of those which use their resources for productive results. Conflict is inevitable, but systems that have no means to resolve stalemate are subject to catastrophic failure.
