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Two Moves of Memory Escaped the Cooperation Trap

A simple evolutionary process reached maximum payoff across four social dilemmas when strategies could remember two rounds.

Published Updated Story ID: mp-2026-08-07-019
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Summary

A simple evolutionary process reached maximum payoff across four social dilemmas when strategies could remember two rounds.

Mutation near the strategy-space boundary and pairwise comparison produced maximum-payoff communities in Prisoner's Dilemma, Snowdrift, Stag Hunt and Harmony games. Memory-one strategies could in principle solve them but often fell into a Snowdrift hold trap.

Why it matters

A simple evolutionary process reached maximum payoff across four social dilemmas when strategies could remember two rounds.

Limits and context

No additional limitation was separately recorded.

Key claims

  1. A simple evolutionary process reached maximum payoff across four social dilemmas when strategies could remember two rounds.

    Evidence: source-2026-08-07-021

Sources

  1. arXiv preprint 2608.06147arXiv · primary research

Corrections

No corrections have been recorded for this story.