Game Theory Calls Cooperation Into Question

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from Quanta Magazine: The physicist Freeman Dyson and the computer scientist William Press, both highly accomplished in their fields, have found a new solution to a famous, decades-old game theory scenario called the prisoner's dilemma, in which players must decide whether to cheat or cooperate with a partner. The prisoner's dilemma has long been used to help explain how cooperation might endure in nature. After all, natural selection is ruled by the survival of the fittest, so one might expect that selfish strategies benefiting the individual would be most likely to persist. But careful study of the prisoner's dilemma revealed that organisms could act entirely in their own self-interest and still create a cooperative community.

Press and Dyson's new solution to the problem, however, threw that rosy perspective into question (abstract). It suggested the best strategies were selfish ones that led to extortion, not cooperation.

[Theoretical biologist Joshua] Plotkin found the duo's math remarkable in its elegance. But the outcome troubled him. Nature includes numerous examples of cooperative behavior. For example, vampire bats donate some of their blood meal to community members that fail to find prey. Some species of birds and social insects routinely help raise another's brood. Even bacteria can cooperate, sticking to each other so that some may survive poison. If extortion reigns, what drives these and other acts of selflessness?"

Comments

The model isn't real.

[Kaenneth]

Real Life isn't Spherical Cows. They need a better model.

The model doesn't describe the system.

[kuzb]

It's that simple. They have a neat mathematical model which is interesting, but if it doesn't make accurate predictions when applied to a more realistic scenario then it's missing something.

Re: Nothing is possible.

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been proven over and over that the only people who always behave according to game theory are economists and sociopaths.

Naturally we have a whole economic system based on this. People wonder why nobody's happy with it, and yet we have a population that is dumb enough to quite literally go to war for it.

Re: Nothing is possible.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

You live in a fantasy world where those bad things are happening.

Meanwhile, in the real, actually-measured world, things are continuing to get better decade by decade.

If the west has come close to stagnating for a bit, it's because places like China are opening up and becoming more economically free. In short, the average health and wealth of economically free people continues to increase, exactly according to Julian Simon's simple, and not really controversial in the details, model.