The book describes the world's first successful experiment in fully automated board game design. Evolutionary methods were used to derive new rule sets within a custom game description language, and self-play trials used to estimate each derived game's potential to interest human players. The end result is a number of new and interesting games, one of which has proved popular and gone on to be commercially published.
According to the reigning competition-driven model of evolution, selfish behaviors that maximize an organism’s reproductive potential offer a fitness advantage over self-sacrificing behaviors—rendering unselfish behavior for the sake of others a mystery that requires extra explanation. Evolution, Games, and God addresses this conundrum by exploring how cooperation, working alongside mutation and natural selection, plays a critical role in populations from microbes to human societies. Inheriting a tendency to cooperate, argue the contributors to this book, may be as beneficial as the self-preserving instincts usually thought to be decisive in evolutionary dynamics. Assembling experts in mathematical biology, history of science, psychology, philosophy, and theology, Martin Nowak and Sarah Coakley take an interdisciplinary approach to the terms “cooperation” and “altruism.” Using game theory, the authors elucidate mechanisms by which cooperation—a form of working together in which one individual benefits at the cost of another—arises through natural selection. They then examine altruism—cooperation which includes the sometimes conscious choice to act sacrificially for the collective good—as a key concept in scientific attempts to explain the origins of morality. Discoveries in cooperation go beyond the spread of genes in a population to include the spread of cultural transformations such as languages, ethics, and religious systems of meaning. The authors resist the presumption that theology and evolutionary theory are inevitably at odds. Rather, in rationally presenting a number of theological interpretations of the phenomena of cooperation and altruism, they find evolutionary explanation and theology to be strongly compatible.
The author examines the interplay between evolutionary game theory and the equilibrium selection problem in noncooperative games. Evolutionary game theory is one of the most active and rapidly growing areas of research in economics. Unlike traditional game theory models, which assume that all players are fully rational and have complete knowledge of details of the game, evolutionary models assume that people choose their strategies through a trial-and-error learning process in which they gradually discover that some strategies work better than others. In games that are repeated many times, low-payoff strategies tend to be weeded out, and an equilibrium may emerge. Larry Samuelson has been one of the main contributors to the evolutionary game theory literature. In Evolutionary Games and Equilibrium Selection, he examines the interplay between evolutionary game theory and the equilibrium selection problem in noncooperative games. After providing an overview of the basic issues of game theory and a presentation of the basic models, the book addresses evolutionary stability, the dynamics of sample paths, the ultimatum game, drift, noise, backward and forward induction, and strict Nash equilibria.
Every form of behaviour is shaped by trial and error. Such stepwise adaptation can occur through individual learning or through natural selection, the basis of evolution. Since the work of Maynard Smith and others, it has been realised how game theory can model this process. Evolutionary game theory replaces the static solutions of classical game theory by a dynamical approach centred not on the concept of rational players but on the population dynamics of behavioural programmes. In this book the authors investigate the nonlinear dynamics of the self-regulation of social and economic behaviour, and of the closely related interactions between species in ecological communities. Replicator equations describe how successful strategies spread and thereby create new conditions which can alter the basis of their success, i.e. to enable us to understand the strategic and genetic foundations of the endless chronicle of invasions and extinctions which punctuate evolution. In short, evolutionary game theory describes when to escalate a conflict, how to elicit cooperation, why to expect a balance of the sexes, and how to understand natural selection in mathematical terms.
This volume is based on lectures delivered at the 2011 AMS Short Course on Evolutionary Game Dynamics, held January 4-5, 2011 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Evolutionary game theory studies basic types of social interactions in populations of players. It combines the strategic viewpoint of classical game theory (independent rational players trying to outguess each other) with population dynamics (successful strategies increase their frequencies). A substantial part of the appeal of evolutionary game theory comes from its highly diverse applications such as social dilemmas, the evolution of language, or mating behaviour in animals. Moreover, its methods are becoming increasingly popular in computer science, engineering, and control theory. They help to design and control multi-agent systems, often with a large number of agents (for instance, when routing drivers over highway networks or data packets over the Internet). While these fields have traditionally used a top down approach by directly controlling the behaviour of each agent in the system, attention has recently turned to an indirect approach allowing the agents to function independently while providing incentives that lead them to behave in the desired way. Instead of the traditional assumption of equilibrium behaviour, researchers opt increasingly for the evolutionary paradigm and consider the dynamics of behaviour in populations of agents employing simple, myopic decision rules.
In almost every human society some people get more and others get less. Why is inequity the rule in these societies? In The Origins of Unfairness, philosopher Cailin O'Connor firstly considers how groups are divided into social categories, like gender, race, and religion, to address this question. She uses the formal frameworks of game theory and evolutionary game theory to explore the cultural evolution of the conventions which piggyback on these seemingly irrelevant social categories. These frameworks elucidate a variety of topics from the innateness of gender differences, to collaboration in academia, to household bargaining, to minority disadvantage, to homophily. They help to show how inequity can emerge from simple processes of cultural change in groups with gender and racial categories, and under a wide array of situations. The process of learning conventions of coordination and resource division is such that some groups will tend to get more and others less. O'Connor offers solutions to such problems of coordination and resource division and also shows why we need to think of inequity as part of an ever evolving process. Surprisingly minimal conditions are needed to robustly produce phenomena related to inequity and, once inequity emerges in these models, it takes very little for it to persist indefinitely. Thus, those concerned with social justice must remain vigilant against the dynamic forces that push towards inequity.
This book both summarizes the basic theory of evolutionary games and explains their developing applications, giving special attention to the 2-player, 2-strategy game. This game, usually termed a "2×2 game” in the jargon, has been deemed most important because it makes it possible to posit an archetype framework that can be extended to various applications for engineering, the social sciences, and even pure science fields spanning theoretical biology, physics, economics, politics, and information science. The 2×2 game is in fact one of the hottest issues in the field of statistical physics. The book first shows how the fundamental theory of the 2×2 game, based on so-called replicator dynamics, highlights its potential relation with nonlinear dynamical systems. This analytical approach implies that there is a gap between theoretical and reality-based prognoses observed in social systems of humans as well as in those of animal species. The book explains that this perceived gap is the result of an underlying reciprocity mechanism called social viscosity. As a second major point, the book puts a sharp focus on network reciprocity, one of the five fundamental mechanisms for adding social viscosity to a system and one that has been a great concern for study by statistical physicists in the past decade. The book explains how network reciprocity works for emerging cooperation, and readers can clearly understand the existence of substantial mechanics when the term "network reciprocity" is used. In the latter part of the book, readers will find several interesting examples in which evolutionary game theory is applied. One such example is traffic flow analysis. Traffic flow is one of the subjects that fluid dynamics can deal with, although flowing objects do not comprise a pure fluid but, rather, are a set of many particles. Applying the framework of evolutionary games to realistic traffic flows, the book reveals that social dilemma structures lie behind traffic flow.
An introduction to game theory that offers not only theoretical tools but also the intuition and behavioral insights to apply these tools to real-world situations. This introductory text on game theory provides students with both the theoretical tools to analyze situations through the logic of game theory and the intuition and behavioral insights to apply these tools to real-world situations. It is unique among game theory texts in offering a clear, formal introduction to standard game theory while incorporating evidence from experimental data and introducing recent behavioral models. Students will not only learn about incentives, how to represent situations as games, and what agents “should” do in these situations, but they will also be presented with evidence that either confirms the theoretical assumptions or suggests a way in which the theory might be updated. Features: Each chapter begins with a motivating example that can be run as an experiment and ends with a discussion of the behavior in the example. Parts I–IV cover the fundamental “nuts and bolts” of any introductory game theory course, including the theory of games, simple games with simultaneous decision making by players, sequential move games, and incomplete information in simultaneous and sequential move games. Parts V–VII apply the tools developed in previous sections to bargaining, cooperative game theory, market design, social dilemmas, and social choice and voting. Part VIII offers a more in-depth discussion of behavioral game theory models including evolutionary and psychological game theory. Supplemental material on the book’s website include solutions to end-of-chapter exercises, a manual for running each chapter’s experimental games using pencil and paper, and the oTree codes for running the games online.
Introduces current evolutionary game theory--where ideas from evolutionary biology and rationalistic economics meet--emphasizing the links between static and dynamic approaches and noncooperative game theory. This text introduces current evolutionary game theory--where ideas from evolutionary biology and rationalistic economics meet--emphasizing the links between static and dynamic approaches and noncooperative game theory. Much of the text is devoted to the key concepts of evolutionary stability and replicator dynamics. The former highlights the role of mutations and the latter the mechanisms of selection. Moreover, set-valued static and dynamic stability concepts, as well as processes of social evolution, are discussed. Separate background chapters are devoted to noncooperative game theory and the theory of ordinary differential equations. There are examples throughout as well as individual chapter summaries. Because evolutionary game theory is a fast-moving field that is itself branching out and rapidly evolving, Jörgen Weibull has judiciously focused on clarifying and explaining core elements of the theory in an up-to-date, comprehensive, and self-contained treatment. The result is a text for second-year graduate students in economic theory, other social sciences, and evolutionary biology. The book goes beyond filling the gap between texts by Maynard-Smith and Hofbauer and Sigmund that are currently being used in the field. Evolutionary Game Theory will also serve as an introduction for those embarking on research in this area as well as a reference for those already familiar with the field. Weibull provides an overview of the developments that have taken place in this branch of game theory, discusses the mathematical tools needed to understand the area, describes both the motivation and intuition for the concepts involved, and explains why and how it is relevant to economics.
