Dashiell E. A. Fryer

The art of war: beyond memory-one strategies in population games.

We show that the history of play in a population game contains exploitable information that can be successfully used by sophisticated strategies to defeat memory-one opponents, including zero determinant strategies. The history allows a player to label opponents by their strategies, enabling a player to determine the population distribution and to act differentially based on the opponent’s strategy in each pairwise interaction. For the Prisoner’s Dilemma, these advantages lead to the natural formation of cooperative coalitions among similarly behaving players and eventually to unilateral defection against opposing player types. We show analytically and empirically that optimal play in population games depends strongly on the population distribution. For example, the optimal strategy for a minority player type against a resident TFT population is ALLC, while for a majority player type the optimal strategy versus TFT players is ALLD. Such behaviors are not accessible to memory-one strategies. Drawing inspiration from Sun Tzu’s the Art of War, we implemented a non-memory-one strategy for population games based on techniques from machine learning and statistical inference that can exploit the history of play in this manner. Via simulation we find that this strategy is essentially uninvadable and can successfully invade (significantly more likely than a neutral mutant) essentially all known memory-one strategies for the Prisoner’s Dilemma, including ALLC (always cooperate), ALLD (always defect), tit-for-tat (TFT), win-stay-lose-shift (WSLS), and zero determinant (ZD) strategies, including extortionate and generous strategies.

Stationary Stability for Evolutionary Dynamics in Finite Populations

We demonstrate a vast expansion of the theory of evolutionary stability to finite populations with mutation, connecting the theory of the stationary distribution of the Moran process with the Lyapunov theory of evolutionary stability. We define the notion of stationary stability for the Moran process with mutation and generalizations, as well as a generalized notion of evolutionary stability that includes mutation called an incentive stable state (ISS) candidate. For sufficiently large populations, extrema of the stationary distribution are ISS candidates and we give a family of Lyapunov quantities that are locally minimized at the stationary extrema and at ISS candidates. In various examples, including for the Moran and Wright-Fisher processes, we show that the local maxima of the stationary distribution capture the traditionally-defined evolutionarily stable states. The classical stability theory of the replicator dynamic is recovered in the large population limit. Finally we include descriptions of possible extensions to populations of variable size and populations evolving on graphs.

Lyapunov Functions for Time-Scale Dynamics on Riemannian Geometries of the Simplex

We combine incentive, adaptive, and time-scale dynamics to study multipopulation dynamics on the simplex equipped with a large class of Riemannian metrics, simultaneously generalizing and extending many dynamics commonly studied in dynamic game theory and evolutionary dynamics. Each population has its own geometry, method of adaptation (incentive), and time-scale (discrete, continuous, and others). Using information-theoretic measures of distance we give a widely-applicable Lyapunov result for the dynamics.We combine incentive, adaptive, and time-scale dynamics to study multipopulation dynamics on the simplex equipped with a large class of Riemmanian metrics, simultaneously generalizing and extending many dynamics commonly studied in dynamic game theory and evolutionary dynamics. Each population has its own geometry, method of adaptation (incentive), and time-scale (discrete, continuous, and others). Using an information-theoretic measure of distance we give a widely-applicable Lyapunov result for the dynamic. We include a wealth of examples leading up to and beyond the main results.

Entropic Equilibria Selection of Stationary Extrema in Finite Populations

We propose the entropy of random Markov trajectories originating and terminating at the same state as a measure of the stability of a state of a Markov process. These entropies can be computed in terms of the entropy rates and stationary distributions of Markov processes. We apply this definition of stability to local maxima and minima of the stationary distribution of the Moran process with mutation and show that variations in population size, mutation rate, and strength of selection all affect the stability of the stationary extrema.