Evolving cooperation in the non-iterated prisoner's dilemma: The importance of spatial organization

Abstract

Most work on evolving cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma treats the non-iterated game as an undesirable simple case that should be risen above. It has been taken as a given that populations evolving to play the non-iterated game will always converge on defection. This paper questions this assumption, and demonstrates that organizing a population spatially dramatically changes the nature of the game and allows cooperation to emerge.