Static cooperator-defector patterns in models of the snowdrift game played on cycle graphs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Evolutionary graph theory is an extension of evolutionary game theory in which each individual agent, represented by a node, interacts only with a subset of the entire population to which it belongs (i.e., those to which it is connected by edges). In the context of the evolution of cooperation, in which individuals playing the cooperator strategy interact with individuals playing the defector strategy and game payoffs are equated with fitness, evolutionary games on graphs lead to global standoffs (i.e., static patterns) when all cooperators in a population have the same payoff as any defectors with which they share an edge. I consider the simplest type of regular-connected graph, the cycle graph, in which every node has exactly two edges (k = 2), for the prisoner's dilemma game and the snowdrift game, the two most important pairwise games in cooperation theory. I show that for simplified payoff structures associated with these games, standoffs are only possible for two valid cost-benefit ratios in the snowdrift game. I further show that only the greater of these two cost-benefit ratios is likely to be attracting in most situations (i.e., likely to spontaneously result in a global standoff when starting from nonstandoff conditions). Numerical simulations confirm this prediction. This work contributes to our understanding of the evolution of pattern formation in games played in finite, sparsely connected populations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".