Evolution of cooperation and communication skills as a consequence of environment fluctuations

The importance of microscopic details on cooperation level is an intensively studied aspect of evolutionary game theory. Interestingly, these details become crucial on heterogeneous populations where individuals may possess diverse traits. By introducing a coevolutionary model in which not only strategies but also individual dynamical features may evolve we revealed that the formerly established conclusion is not necessarily true when different updating rules are on stage. In...

Large-scale cooperation underpins the evolution of ecosystems and the human society, and the collective behaviors by self-organization of multi-agent systems are the key for understanding. As artificial intelligence (AI) prevails in almost all branches of science, it would be of great interest to see what new insights of collective behavior could be obtained from a multi-agent AI system. Here, we introduce a typical reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm -- Q learning into evo...

This brief discusses evolutionary game theory as a powerful and unified mathematical tool to study evolution of collective behaviours. It summarises some of my recent research directions using evolutionary game theory methods, which include i) the analysis of statistical properties of the number of (stable) equilibria in a random evolutionary game, and ii) the modelling of safety behaviours' evolution and the risk posed by advanced Artificial Intelligence technologies in a te...

Purpose: We propose a model to present a possible mechanism for obtaining sizeable behavioural structures by simulating an agent based on the evolutionary public good game with available social learning. Methods: The model considered a population with a fixed number of players. For each round, the chosen players may contribute part of their value to a common pool. Then each player may imitate the strategy of another player, based on relative payoffs (whoever has the lower pay...

Cooperation is of utmost importance to society as a whole, but is often challenged by individual self-interests. While game theory has studied this problem extensively, there is little work on interactions within and across groups with different preferences or beliefs. Yet, people from different social or cultural backgrounds often meet and interact. This can yield conflict, since behavior that is considered cooperative by one population might be perceived as non-cooperative ...

We study the evolution of cooperation in structured populations within popular models of social dilemmas, whereby simple coevolutionary rules are introduced that may enhance players abilities to enforce their strategy on the opponent. Coevolution thus here refers to an evolutionary process affecting the teaching activity of players that accompanies the evolution of their strategies. Particularly, we increase the teaching activity of a player after it has successfully reproduc...

In social dilemmas, individuals face a conflict between their own self-interest and the collective interest of the group. The provision of reward has been shown to be an effective means to drive cooperation in such situations. However, previous research has often made the idealized assumption that rewards are constant and do not change in response to changes in the game environment. In this paper, we introduce reward into the public goods game and develop a coevolutionary gam...

In this work we have used computer models of social-like networks to show by extensive numerical simulations that cooperation in evolutionary games can emerge and be stable on this class of networks. The amounts of cooperation reached are at least as much as in scale-free networks but here the population model is more realistic. Cooperation is robust with respect to different strategy update rules, population dynamics, and payoff computation. Only when straight average payoff...

Social dilemmas are an integral part of social interactions. Cooperative actions, ranging from secreting extra-cellular products in microbial populations to donating blood in humans, are costly to the actor and hence create an incentive to shirk and avoid the costs. Nevertheless, cooperation is ubiquitous in nature. Both costs and benefits often depend non-linearly on the number and types of individuals involved -- as captured by idioms such as `too many cooks spoil the broth...

Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its proper place. In this contribution, the most important controversies and open research avenues in the field of social evolution are reviewed. It is argued that a novel theory of social evolution must integrate the concepts of the science of ...