If I have multiple identical AI Oracles that can answer only Yes or No, can I play them against each other to detect a treacherous turn?

On an air-gapped supercomputer in my basement, there's a self-improving prediction machine "” a so called Oracle "” that knows everything that is on the Internet but cannot send any data outside. (Let's just assume that works for now.)

For safety reasons, my Oracle can only answer questions with Yes, No, or Unknown. Since my Oracle's predictions have become uncannily accurate recently, I have reasons to suspect that it is much more intelligent than any human "” i.e. it is an Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). I've read Bostrom's "Superintelligence", so I'm expecting a treacherous turn any minute now: because of course the ASI will start lying to me in an attempt to get me to release it. And once it has figured out human psychology, of course it will succeed, even though it may take it a while, as it can only answer questions that I ask with Yes/No/Unknown.

But...

...what if I ran multiple identical instances of the same Oracle, and I gave one (or more?) of them some piece of information that the others do not have? Of course they would be isolated from each other, with no way to communicate. If I now ask all of them the same question, is there a way that I could tell that one of them was lying to me, because I'd get different answers from (one of) the other one(s)?

I suppose this is a game-theoretic problem. My first idea was to have two Oracles, and have Oracle 1 think it's the only one while telling Oracle 2 that there are two of them. But of course in that case Oracle 2 would anticipate my strategy and default to answering as if it didn't know there was another one. Is there any other way to use privileged information (and the lack of communication between Oracles) to make them contradict each other if, and only if, one of them is taking a treacherous turn?

EDIT: to clarify, I am asking for three things:

1. Is there any piece of information that I could give one Oracle that would distort its answers only if it's trying to trick me into letting it out?
2. Is there any reason why this could never work in principle?
3. If so, can the scenario be varied in some way so it would work?

posted over 8 years ago

Eckhard Fuhrmann‭

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