We consider the prisoner's dilemma game on a square lattice and examine how quenched age distributions and different aging protocols influence the evolution of cooperation when taking the life experience and knowledge accumulation into account as time passes. We find that a quenched assignment of age to players, introducing heterogeneity to the game, substantially promotes cooperative behavior. Introduction of aging and subsequent death as a coevolutionary process may act detrimental on cooperation but enhances it efficiently if the offspring of individuals that have successfully passed their strategy is considered newborn. We study resulting age distributions of players and show that the heterogeneity is vital-yet insufficient-for explaining the observed differences in cooperator abundance on the spatial grid.
COBISS.SI-ID: 13685270
We show that strategy-independent adaptations of random interaction networks can induce powerful mechanisms, ranging from the Red Queen to group selection, which promote cooperation in evolutionary social dilemmas. These two mechanisms emerge spontaneously as dynamical processes due to deletions and additions of links, which are performed whenever players adopt new strategies and after a certain number of game iterations, respectively. The potency of cooperation promotion, as well as the mechanism responsible for it, can thereby be tuned via a single parameter determining the frequency of link additions. We thus demonstrate that coevolving random networks may evoke an appropriate mechanism for each social dilemma, such that cooperation prevails even in highly unfavorable conditions.
COBISS.SI-ID: 13250070
To be the fittest is central to proliferation in evolutionary games. Individuals thus adopt the strategies of better performing players in the hopeof successful reproduction. In structured populations the array of those that are eligible to act as strategy sources is bounded to the immediate neighbors of each individual. But which one of these strategy sources should potentially be copied? Previous research dealt with this question either by selecting the fittest or by selecting one player uniformly at random. Here we introduce a parameter that interpolates between these two extreme options. Setting equal to zero returns the random selection of the opponent, while positive favor the fitter players. In addition, we divide the population intotwo groups. Players from group select their opponents as dictated by the parameter , while players from group do so randomly irrespective of . We denote the fraction of players contained in groups and by and , respectively. The two parameters and allow us to analyze in detail how aspirations in the context of the prisoner's dilemma game influence the evolution of cooperation. We find that for sufficiently positive values of there exist a robust intermediate for which cooperation thrives best. The robustness of this observation is tested against different levels of uncertainty in the strategy adoption process and for different interaction networks. We also provide complete phase diagrams depicting the dependence of the impact of and for different values of , and contrast the validity of ourconclusions by means of an alternative model where individual aspiration levels are subject to evolution as well. Our study indicates that heterogeneity in aspirations may be key for the sustainability of cooperation in structured populations.
COBISS.SI-ID: 14724886
We study the evolution of cooperation in spatial public goods games where, besides the classical strategies of cooperation (C) and defection (D), we consider punishing cooperators (PC) or punishing defectors (PD) as an additional strategy. Using a minimalist modeling approach, our goal is to separately clarify and identify the consequences of the two punishing strategies. Since punishment is costly, punishing strategies lose the evolutionary competition in case of well-mixed interactions. When spatial interactions are taken into account, however, the outcome can be strikingly different, and cooperation may spread. The underlying mechanism depends on the character of the punishment strategy. In the case of cooperating punishers,increasing the fine results in a rising cooperation level. In contrast, in the presence of the PD strategy, the phase diagram exhibits a reentrant transition as the fine is increased. Accordingly, the level of cooperation shows a non-monotonous dependence on the fine. Remarkably, punishing strategies can spread in both cases, but based on largely different mechanisms, which depend on the cooperativeness (or not) of punishers.
COBISS.SI-ID: 14377750