Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Evolution of Inequality – Does Unfairness Triumph After All?

Found via John Hawks.

A new paper, Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma contains strategies that dominate any evolutionary opponent (pdf), has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Written by William Press and Freeman Dyson, it represents a substantial breakthrough in strategies that work in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game.

The key point? There does exist a strategy where a player can “enforce a unilateral claim to an unfair share of rewards.”

The implications of this paper are fascinating. For biological evolution, it opens up new thinking about reproductive strategies and life history theory, as well as the direct impact on ideas about the evolution of cooperation.