TITLE: The emergence of cooperation
in the evolutionary spatial prisoners' dilemma on a path or
cycle

SPEAKER: Prof. Jan van Vuuren, Univ. of Stellenbosch, South Africa

ABSTRACT:

 In
this talk we consider the Evolutionary Spatial
Prisoners' Dilemma (ESPD) in which players are
modelled by the vertices of an underlying graph G representing
some spatial organisational structure amongst the players.
During each round of the ESPD every pair of adjacent
players in G play a classical prisoners' dilemma
against each other, and they update their strategies from
one round to the next based on the perceived success (as
measured by pay-off values) achieved by the strategies of
their neighbours during the previous round. In this way
players are able to adapt and learn good strategies from
each other as the game progresses, without understanding
why these strategies are good. We characterise all steady
states of the ESPD for the two cases where G is a
path or a cycle, and we also characterise those initial
states that lead to the emergence of persistent substates
of cooperation over time. We finally determine
analytically (i.e. without using simulation) the
probability that the game's states will evolve from a
randomly generated initial state towards a steady state
which accommodates some form of persistent cooperation.

Joint work with Alewyn Burger & Martijn
van der Merwe