An AI can simulate an economy millions of times to create fairer tax policy
> In the simulation, four AI workers are each controlled by their own reinforcement-learning models. They interact with a two-dimensional world, gathering wood and stone and either trading these resources with others or using them to build houses, which earns them money. The workers have different levels of skill, which leads them to specialize. Lower-skilled workers learn they do better if they gather resources, and higher-skilled ones learn they do better if they buy resources to build houses.<p>So basically they're tackling one of the hardest macroeconomic problems with a simple and completely abstract microeconomic model which sounds less like cutting edge AI and more like a fusion of iterated prisoner dilemma models and the Edgeworth box.<p>> the AI’s policy cobbled together aspects of both, applying the highest tax rates to rich and poor<p>Sounds like they've overfitted to the model's assumptions so much their agents are choosing to not be poor primarily to reduce their tax bill...