The Evolution of Cooperation

The Evolution of Cooperation is a 1984 book written by political scientist Robert Axelrod that expands upon a paper of the same name written by Axelrod and evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton. The article's summary addresses the issue in terms of "cooperation in organisms, whether bacteria or primates". The book details a theory on the emergence of cooperation between individuals, drawing from game theory and evolutionary biology. Since 2006, reprints of the book have included a foreword by Richard Dawkins and have been marketed as a revised edition. The book provides an investigation into how cooperation can emerge and persist as explained by the application of game theory. The book provides a detailed explanation of the evolution of cooperation, beyond traditional game theory. Academic literature regarding forms of cooperation that are not easily explained in traditional game theory, especially when considering evolutionary biology, largely took its modern form as a result of Axelrod's and Hamilton's influential 1981 paper and the subsequent book. Axelrod initially solicited strategies from other game theorists to compete in the first tournament. Each strategy was paired with each other strategy for 200 iterations of a Prisoner's Dilemma game and scored on the total points accumulated through the tournament. The winner was a very simple strategy submitted by Anatol Rapoport called "TIT FOR TAT" (TFT) that cooperates on the first move, and subsequently echoes (reciprocates) what the other player did on the previous move. The results of the first tournament were analyzed and published, and a second tournament was held to see if anyone could find a better strategy. TIT FOR TAT won again. Axelrod analyzed the results and made some interesting discoveries about the nature of cooperation, which he describes in his book In both actual tournaments and various replays, the best-performing strategies were nice: that is, they were never the first to defect.

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