Regensburg 2010 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 7: Evolutionary Game Theory I (with BP)

SOE 7.1: Invited Talk

Tuesday, March 23, 2010, 09:30–10:00, H44

Humans playing spatial games — •Arne Traulsen — Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Biology, 24306 Plön, Germany

Probably the most thoroughly studied mechanism that can explain the evolution and maintenance of costly cooperation among selfish individual is population structure. In the past years, hundreds of papers have mathematically modeled how cooperation can emerge under various dynamical rules and in more and more complex population structures [1]. However, so far there is a significant lack of experimental data in this field. We have conducted an experimental test to address how humans are playing a particularly simple spatial game on a regular lattice [2]. The data shows that the way humans choose strategies is different from the usual assumptions of theoretical models. Most importantly, spontaneous strategy changes corresponding to mutations or exploration behavior is more frequent than assumed in many models. This can decrease the influence of some spatial structures. This experimental approach to measure properties of the update mechanisms used in theoretical models may be useful for mathematical models of evolutionary games in structured populations.
[1] Szabó and Fáth, Evolutionary games on graphs, Physics Reports 446:97-216 (2007)

[2] Traulsen, Semmann, Sommerfeld, Krambeck, and Milinski, submitted