Lessons on Value of Information From Civ — LessWrong
I’m a big fan of the game Civilization. Civ is the canonical empire-building game: you explore the world, expand your empire, manage your economy, invade other empires, unlock new tech, etc. A few months ago, the game released “tech shuffle mode”, which radically changes the game (and IMO makes it a lot more interesting). Usually, a not-yet-unlocked section of the tech tree looks like this: To unlock a tech, we first need to unlock the prerequisite techs (in left-to-right order). The tree is the same in every game, so we can plan ahead to unlock key technologies early - e.g. we can ignore the lower half of the tree in order to get to Steam Power faster. But with tech shuffle mode, a not-yet-unlocked section of the tree looks like this: The tree structure is randomly generated each game (although techs are still grouped by “era”, so e.g. we won’t unlock nukes right at the start of the game). Techs are also hidden until we’re ready to research them (i.e. until we unlock the prereqs). Tha