Abstract
Abstract Evolutionary applications of game theory present one of the most pedagogically accessible varieties of genuine, contemporary theoretical biology. We present here Oyun (oy-oon, http://charlespence.net/oyun), a program designed to run iterated prisoner's dilemma tournaments, competitions between prisoner's dilemma strategies developed by the students themselves. Using this software, students are able to readily design and tweak their own strategies, and to see how they fare both in round-robin tournaments and in “evolutionary” tournaments, where the scores in a given “generation” directly determine contribution to the population in the next generation. Oyun is freely available, runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, and the process of creating new prisoner's dilemma strategies is both easy to teach and easy for students to grasp. We illustrate with two interesting examples taken from actual use of Oyun in the classroom.
Highlights
When we are investigating biological cases in which cooperation of various varieties has evolved, often a patternEvo Edu Outreach (2012) 5:467–476 appears—these examples seem amenable to “freeloading” or “cheating.” Consider the case of predator inspection in guppies (Dugatkin and Alfieri 1991)
We present here Oyun (OY-oon, http:// charlespence.net/oyun),2 a program designed to run iterated prisoner's dilemma tournaments—competitions between strategies developed by the students themselves
We describe the motivation behind teaching the iterated prisoner's dilemma, show how students can craft their own strategies in Oyun, and show the results of some sample tournaments based on two surprising results from the classroom: one showing host/parasite behavior, and the other showing the detection of anti-social behavior
Summary
When we are investigating biological cases in which cooperation of various varieties has evolved, often a pattern. It seems, for any individual fish to be a freeloader, to refuse to contribute to the group's mutual benefit This structure of incentives, as it turns out, is quite common in nature—examples include food gathering, tree height, the expansion of plant roots, body size, and even the replication of virus populations Each prisoner (confined separately and unable to communicate with his partner) is given the choice to remain silent (to “cooperate” with their partner) or to turn state's evidence and testify against the other (to “defect” against their partner) If both cooperate (remain silent), they will each receive a small jail term. Turn the various possible “outcomes” for the two prisoners into numerical “payoff” values—with higher “payoff” for lower jail time If both prisoners choose to cooperate, they each receive a payoff of three (the light sentence). If we add to the model the assumptions that the game is played more than once and that the players keep track of what happened during their
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