No Arabic abstract
The n-person Prisoners Dilemma is a widely used model for populations where individuals interact in groups. The evolutionary stability of populations has been analysed in the literature for the case where mutations in the population may be considered as isolated events. For this case, and assuming simple trigger strategies and many iterations per game, we analyse the rate of convergence to the evolutionarily stable populations. We find that for some values of the payoff parameters of the Prisoners Dilemma this rate is so low that the assumption, that mutations in the population are infrequent on that timescale, is unreasonable. Furthermore, the problem is compounded as the group size is increased. In order to address this issue, we derive a deterministic approximation of the evolutionary dynamics with explicit, stochastic mutation processes, valid when the population size is large. We then analyse how the evolutionary dynamics depends on the following factors: mutation rate, group size, the value of the payoff parameters, and the structure of the initial population. In order to carry out the simulations for groups of more than just a few individuals, we derive an efficient way of calculating the fitness values. We find that when the mutation rate per individual and generation is very low, the dynamics is characterised by populations which are evolutionarily stable. As the mutation rate is increased, other fixed points with a higher degree of cooperation become stable. For some values of the payoff parameters, the system is characterised by (apparently) stable limit cycles dominated by cooperative behaviour. The parameter regions corresponding to high degree of cooperation grow in size with the mutation rate, and in number with the group size.
In the evolutionary Prisoners Dilemma (PD) game, agents play with each other and update their strategies in every generation according to some microscopic dynamical rule. In its spatial version, agents do not play with every other but, instead, interact only with their neighbors, thus mimicking the existing of a social or contact network that defines who interacts with whom. In this work, we explore evolutionary, spatial PD systems consisting of two types of agents, each with a certain update (reproduction, learning) rule. We investigate two different scenarios: in the first case, update rules remain fixed for the entire evolution of the system; in the second case, agents update both strategy and update rule in every generation. We show that in a well-mixed population the evolutionary outcome is always full defection. We subsequently focus on two-strategy competition with nearest-neighbor interactions on the contact network and synchronized update of strategies. Our results show that, for an important range of the parameters of the game, the final state of the system is largely different from that arising from the usual setup of a single, fixed dynamical rule. Furthermore, the results are also very different if update rules are fixed or evolve with the strategies. In these respect, we have studied representative update rules, finding that some of them may become extinct while others prevail. We describe the new and rich variety of final outcomes that arise from this co-evolutionary dynamics. We include examples of other neighborhoods and asynchronous updating that confirm the robustness of our conclusions. Our results pave the way to an evolutionary rationale for modelling social interactions through game theory with a preferred set of update rules.
We study the problem of the emergence of cooperation in the spatial Prisoners Dilemma. The pioneering work by Nowak and May showed that large initial populations of cooperators can survive and sustain cooperation in a square lattice with imitate-the-best evolutionary dynamics. We revisit this problem in a cost-benefit formulation suitable for a number of biological applications. We show that if a fixed-amount reward is established for cooperators to share, a single cooperator can invade a population of defectors and form structures that are resilient to re-invasion even if the reward mechanism is turned off. We discuss analytically the case of the invasion by a single cooperator and present agent-based simulations for small initial fractions of cooperators. Large cooperation levels, in the sustainability range, are found. In the conclusions we discuss possible applications of this model as well as its connections with other mechanisms proposed to promote the emergence of cooperation.
We study the evolution of cooperation in spatial Prisoners dilemma games with and without extortion by adopting aspiration-driven strategy updating rule. We focus explicitly on how the strategy updating manner (whether synchronous or asynchronous) and also the introduction of extortion strategy affect the collective outcome of the games. By means of Monte Carlo (MC) simulations as well as dynamical cluster techniques, we find that the involvement of extortioners facilitates the boom of cooperators in the population (and whom can always dominate the population if the temptation to defect is not too large) for both synchronous and asynchronous strategy updating, in stark contrast to the otherwise case, where cooperation is promoted for intermediate aspiration level with synchronous strategy updating, but is remarkably inhibited if the strategy updating is implemented asynchronously. We explain the results by configurational analysis and find that the presence of extortion leads to the checkerboard-like ordering of cooperators and extortioners, which enable cooperators to prevail in the population with both strategy updating manners. Moreover, extortion itself is evolutionary stable, and therefore acts as the incubator for the evolution of cooperation.
The paradox of cooperation among selfish individuals still puzzles scientific communities. Although a large amount of evidence has demonstrated that cooperator clusters in spatial games are effective to protect cooperators against the invasion of defectors, we continue to lack the condition for the formation of a giant cooperator cluster that assures the prevalence of cooperation in a system. Here, we study the dynamical organization of cooperator clusters in spatial prisoners dilemma game to offer the condition for the dominance of cooperation, finding that a phase transition characterized by the emergence of a large spanning cooperator cluster occurs when the initial fraction of cooperators exceeds a certain threshold. Interestingly, the phase transition belongs to different universality classes of percolation determined by the temptation to defect $b$. Specifically, on square lattices, $1<b<4/3$ leads to a phase transition pertaining to the class of regular site percolation, whereas $3/2<b<2$ gives rise to a phase transition subject to invasion percolation with trapping. Our findings offer deeper understanding of the cooperative behaviors in nature and society.
Tumor development is an evolutionary process in which a heterogeneous population of cells with differential growth capabilities compete for resources in order to gain a proliferative advantage. What are the minimal ingredients needed to recreate some of the emergent features of such a developing complex ecosystem? What is a tumor doing before we can detect it? We outline a mathematical model, driven by a stochastic Moran process, in which cancer cells and healthy cells compete for dominance in the population. Each are assigned payoffs according to a Prisoners Dilemma evolutionary game where the healthy cells are the cooperators and the cancer cells are the defectors. With point mutational dynamics, heredity, and a fitness landscape controlling birth and death rates, natural selection acts on the cell population and simulated cancer-like features emerge, such as Gompertzian tumor growth driven by heterogeneity, the log-kill law which (linearly) relates therapeutic dose density to the (log) probability of cancer cell survival, and the Norton-Simon hypothesis which (linearly) relates tumor regression rates to tumor growth rates. We highlight the utility, clarity, and power that such models provide, despite (and because of) their simplicity and built-in assumptions.