Taxonomy / Adversarial proceduralism / Debate rules that cap the honest side's workload
Debate rules that cap the honest side's workload
These are debate protocols written in advance so that a dishonest player cannot win merely by being able to compute more than an honest one. One design lets the honest side succeed using a manageable number of simulation steps even when its opponent is allowed exponentially many; another handles the trick of splitting a question into pieces so obscure that answering them honestly would be intractable, by pairing an arguer with an estimator and holding the honest player's cost comparable to its opponent's. The strategy is to fix the rules of the contest rather than to run it and see how the judge does.
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Papers
No method has been built here yet — this approach rests entirely on what follows.
Argued for, not built
These make the case for this approach, or sketch a design for it, but leave nothing built and tested behind.
Scalable AI Safety via Doubly-Efficient Debate
Jonah Brown-Cohen et al., Nov 2023arXiv:2311.14125ProposalGap
Sets out a new set of debate protocols in which the honest side can always succeed using a simulation of polynomially many steps and can verify the alignment of stochastic AI systems, even where the dishonest side is allowed exponentially many simulation steps.
Avoiding Obfuscation with Prover-Estimator Debate
Jonah Brown-Cohen et al., Jun 2025arXiv:2506.13609ProposalGap
A recursive debate protocol pairing a prover with an estimator, put up against the case where a dishonest debater decomposes a problem into subproblems that force an honest opponent to solve something computationally intractable, and shown to let the honest debater win under certain stability assumptions with a strategy whose computational cost is comparable to its opponent's.