Forgiveness Is an Adaptation in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with Memory
Meliksah Turker
Department of Computer Engineering
Bogazici University
Istanbul 34342, Turkey
Haluk O. Bingol
Faculty of Computer and Information Sciences
Yeditepe University
Istanbul 34755, Turkey
Email: turkermeliksah@hotmail.com; haluk.bingol@yeditepe.edu.tr
Corresponding author
Abstract
The prisoner’s dilemma (PD) is used to represent many real-life phenomena, whether from the civilized world of humans or from the wild world of other living things. Researchers working on the iterated prisoner’s dilemma (IPD) with limited memory inspected the outcome of different forgetting strategies in a homogeneous environment, within which all agents adopt the same forgetting strategy at the same time. In this paper, with the intention to represent real life more realistically, we improve existing forgetting strategies, offer new ones, conduct experiments in a heterogeneous environment that contains mixed agents and compare the results with previous research, as well as conduct experiments in a homogeneous environment via agent-based stochastic simulations. Our findings show that the outcome depends on the type of environment and is just the opposite for homogeneous and heterogeneous ones, opposing the existing literature on the IPD. Consequently, forgetting and forgiving defectors is the supreme memory management strategy in a competitive, heterogeneous environment. Therefore, forgiveness is an adaptation.
Keywords: IPD; iterated prisoner’s dilemma; agent-based simulation; PD; prisoner’s dilemma; limited memory; memory management strategy; forgetting strategy
Cite this publication as:
M. Turker and H. O. Bingol, “Forgiveness Is an Adaptation in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma with Memory,” Complex Systems, 33(3), 2024 pp. 319–332.
https://doi.org/10.25088/ComplexSystems.33.3.319
