Engineering design of strategies for winning iterated prisoner's dilemma competitions
Document Type
Journal Article
Keywords
EFFECTIVE CHOICE, GAME, COOPERATION, INFORMATION, REPUTATION, SELECTION, ALTRUISM
Faculty
Faculty of Computing, Health and Science
School
School of Computer and Security Science / Artificial Intelligence and Optimisation Research Centre
RAS ID
12618
Abstract
In this paper, we investigate winning strategies for round-robin iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) competitions and evolutionary IPD competitions. Since the outcome of a single competition depends on the composition of the population of participants, we propose a statistical evaluation methodology that takes into account outcomes across varying compositions. We run several series of competitions in which the strategies of the participants are randomly chosen from a set of representative strategies. Statistics are gathered to evaluate the performance of each strategy. With this approach, the conditions for some well-known strategies to win a round-robin IPD competition are analyzed. We show that a strategy that uses simple rule-based identification mechanisms to explore and exploit the opponent outperforms well-known strategies such as tit-for-tat (TFT) in most round-robin competitions. Group strategies have an advantage over nongroup strategies in evolutionary IPD competitions. Group strategies adopt different strategies in interacting with kin members and nonkin members. A simple group strategy, Clique, which cooperates only with kin members, performs well in competing against well-known IPD strategies. We introduce several group strategies developed by combining Clique with winning strategies from round-robin competitions and evaluate their performance by adapting three parameters: sole survivor rate, extinction rate, and survival time. Simulation results show that these group strategies outperform well-known IPD strategies in evolutionary IPD competitions.
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Comments
Li, J., Hingston, P. F., & Kendall, G. (2011). Engineering design of strategies for winning iterated prisoner's dilemma competitions. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, 3(4), 348-360. Available here