Evolution of cooperation in populations with multiple strategies

• Grant number: 21/06391-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: August 01, 2021
• End date: July 31, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Physics - General Physics
• Principal Investigator: Marcus Aloizio Martinez de Aguiar
• Grantee: Lucas Lopes Maldonado
• Host Institution: Instituto de Física Gleb Wataghin (IFGW). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Understanding how cooperation emerges between individuals of the same species or even different species is still an open problem. Natural selection tends to favor the selfish, which ends up propagating this characteristic to future generations and suppressing the cooperators. Game theory has been used to describe these processes and the famous prisoner's dilemma has become a paradigm in this study. In this project, we intend to consider populations where cooperators (C) and defectors (D) have a second binary characteristic S that can assume the values (0) or (1) that also influence the interaction with other individuals. We will describe the evolution of this type of population by varying the mode and intensity with which this second characteristic S acts, observing its effect on the fraction of cooperators. We will deal with the game in the mean-field approximation and also in space. In this case, the role of S may be to change the size of the interaction neighborhood, an effect that cannot be dealt with by mean-field theory.