Co-evolutionary games on networks

Abstract

We study agents on a network playing an iterated Prisoner's dilemma against their neighbors. The resulting spatially extended co-evolutionary game exhibits stationary states which are Nash equilibria. After perturbation of these equilibria, avalanches of mutations reestablish a stationary state. Scale-free avalanche distributions are observed that are in accordance with calculations from the Nash equilibria and a confined branching process. The transition from subcritical to critical avalanche dynamics can be traced to a change in the degeneracy of the cooperative macrostate and is observed for many variants of this game.