Efficiency of cooperation in a Prisoner's Dilemma: The impact of social, biological, and environmental evolution in a cellular automaton

The Prisoner's Dilemma PD is a matrix game used to show how cooperative or competitive choices influence a situation. A cellular automaton is a modeling and simulation tool that allows for the study of the effects of various scenarios over a specified number of generations when the environment and evolutionary strategy are specified. The current study attempted to more closely model real life conflict situations in an intercultural cellular automaton using the PD as the payoff matrix. It stressed the importance of several characteristics---culture, memory, and structure---as predominant factors in the process of evolution. Computer simulations were performed over time to study the influence of social (cultural evolution), biological (memory evolution), and environmental (structural evolution) conditions on cooperation, both between and within groups. The results indicate that network structure has a significant effect on the levels of cooperation and success (levels of payoff). Cultural tendencies also have major implications on negotiation processes, regardless of other factors and consequences. Of particular interest are the specific mechanisms by which cultural factors interact with network structure to influence levels of cooperation and levels of payoff, and how those payoffs are distributed among members of the group.