An N-player prisoner’s dilemma in a robotic ecosystem

The iterated prisoner’s dilemma (iPD) in its standard form is a very well-known popular basis for research on cooperation. Here, a significant generalization of the iPD is presented in the form of an N-player game, instead of only two players, with continuous degrees of cooperation, instead of binary cooperation or defection. This continuous N-player PD (CN-PD) is motivated and explained by an actual experimental set-up in the form of an artificial ecosystem including mobile robots. Furthermore, the novel strategy of the so-called Justified-Snobism (JS) is introduced, which tries to cooperate slightly more than the average of the group of players. Results from sets of experiments with N=20 are presented that indicate that JS is indeed a successful strategy in the CN-PD.