49 - Caspar Oesterheld on Program Equilibrium

49 - Caspar Oesterheld on Program Equilibrium

From AXRP - the AI X-risk Research Podcast by Daniel Filan

February 18, 2026 · 2h 32m

About this episode

The episode discusses the concept of program equilibria in game theory with guest Caspar Oesterheld.

How does game theory work when everyone is a computer program who can read everyone else's source code? This is the problem of 'program equilibria'. In this episode, I talk with Caspar Oesterheld on work he's done on equilibria of programs that simulate each other, and how robust these equilibria are. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/axrpodcast Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/axrpodcast Transcript: https://axrp.net/episode/2026/02/18/episode-49-caspar-oesterheld-program-equilibrium.html Note from Caspar on 2:00:06: At least given my current interpretation of what you say here, my answer is wrong. What actually happens is that we're just back in the uncorrelated case. Basically my simulations will be a simulated repeated game in which everything is correlated _because I feed you my random sequence_ and your simulations will be a repeated game where everything is correlated. Halting works the same as usual. But of course what we end up actually playing will be uncorrelated. We discuss something like this later in the episode. Topics we discuss, and timestamps: 0:00:44 Program equilibrium basics 0:14:20 Desiderata for program equilibria 0:24:35 Why program equilibrium matters 0:33:35 Prior…

People in this episode

Host: Daniel Filan

Guest: Caspar Oesterheld

Topics covered

  • game theory
  • program equilibria
  • computer programs
  • simulation
  • robustness
  • equilibria

Keywords

  • program equilibrium
  • game theory
  • equilibria of programs
  • simulation
  • robust program equilibrium

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