EVOLUTIONARY ANALYSIS ON SPATIAL LOCALITY IN N-PERSON ITERATED PRISONER'S DILEMMA

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to consider the effects of spatial locality on the evolution of cooperative behavior in the N-person iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (N-IPD) by focusing on two essentially distinct factors: the scale of interaction (which decides the neighboring members playing the N-person games) and the scale of reproduction (which decides the neighboring candidates for an offspring in each cell). We conducted evolutionary experiments of strategies for one-dimensional N-IPD game with various settings of these two factors. Experimental results revealed that these two factors bring qualitatively different effects to the emergence of cooperative behavior. Furthermore, we investigated the dynamics of the evolution of spatial locality in N-IPD. When we introduced the evolution of the scale of interaction into our model, the dynamic evolution of the scale of interaction through generation facilitated the emergence of global cooperation when the scale of reproduction was relatively small. Experiments with the evolution of the scale of reproduction are also discussed.