The impact of environmental and evolutionary factors on the emergence of cooperation among evolved mobile agents

This paper presents work investigating the influence of various environmental and evolutionary factors on the evolution of cooperation in a spatial game theoretical setting. These include agent mobility, population density, agent lifespan, and the placement mechanism. In the model considered, a population of agents inhabit a toroidal lattice grid, in which they participate in the Prisoner's Dilemma game. The agents have the ability to respond to, and learn from, environmental stimuli. In particular, agents learn movement strategies to compete with other agents in the game, which may result in improved payoffs by increasing the number of beneficial interactions. We compare the levels of cooperation and the corresponding movement strategies evolved under the various environmental and evolutionary settings. We present results indicating that, given suitable densities and evolutionary settings, cooperators in well-mixed populations develop a suitable movement strategy to promote the evolution of cooperation. Additionally, we show that cooperation may emerge without significant aid from mobile strategies given a placement mechanism conducive to the formation of cooperator clusters.