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Location:
John Wakeley
Harvard University, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
"The Evolution of Cooperation in an Iterated Survival Game"
(joint work with Martin Nowak)
Abstract: A new type of a simple iterated game with very natural biological motivation is introduced. Two individuals are chosen at random from a population. They must survive a certain number of steps. They start together, but if one of them dies the other one tries to survive on its own. The only payoff is to survive the game. We only allow two strategies: cooperators help the other individual, while defectors do not. There is no strategic complexity. There are no conditional strategies. Depending on the number of steps we recover various forms of stringent and relaxed cooperative dilemmas. We derive conditions for the evolution of cooperation.