The prisoners dilemma (PD) and iterated prisoners dilemma (IPD) have been a rich source of research material since the 1950's. However, the publication of Axelrod's book in the 1980's was largely responsible for bringing this research to the attention to other areas, outside of game theory, including evolutionary computing, evolutionary biology, networked computer systems and promoting cooperation between opposing countries.
In the prisoners dilemma you have to decide whether to cooperate with an opponent, or defect. Both you and your opponent make a choice and then your decisions are revealed.

You receive payoff, when:
•
 if both players cooperate then both receive 3 points
•
 if one player defects and the other cooperates, the player who defected gets 5 points and the player who cooperated gets nothing
•
 if both player defect then both receive 1 point

  Our goal is to find a good strategy for the prisoner's dilemma and take part at the competition www.prisoners-dilemma.com.

The competitions we are planning to take place:
•
 Re-run the original experiment of Axelrod. We aim to see if a tit-for-tat strategy still dominates or whether somebody can develop a better strategy taking into account that there has been 20 years since the original competition (for example, tit-for-2-tats was claimed to be better than tit-for-tat). In addition, we would expect many more entries that the 62 received by Axelrod (largely due to the internet), thus giving us access to much more data.
•
 Organise a competition that has noise in the data. That is, a signal to cooperate or defect could be mis-executed.

Brunauer Richard
Löcker Andreas
Mitterlechner Gerhard
Payer Hannes

 

• JAVA SDK
• Eclipse
• JEvolution
   
Project Group SS 2004