Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Engineering Sciences, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, 816-8580, Japan.
School of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, People's Republic of China.
J R Soc Interface. 2023 Jul;20(204):20230301. doi: 10.1098/rsif.2023.0301. Epub 2023 Jul 19.
Cooperation plays a crucial role in both nature and human society, and the conundrum of cooperation attracts the attention from interdisciplinary research. In this study, we investigated the evolution of cooperation in optional Prisoner's Dilemma games by introducing simple bots. We focused on one-shot and anonymous games, where the bots could be programmed to always cooperate, always defect, never participate or choose each action with equal probability. Our results show that cooperative bots facilitate the emergence of cooperation among ordinary players in both well-mixed populations and a regular lattice under weak imitation scenarios. Introducing loner bots has no impact on the emergence of cooperation in well-mixed populations, but it facilitates the dominance of cooperation in regular lattices under strong imitation scenarios. However, too many loner bots on a regular lattice inhibit the spread of cooperation and can eventually result in a breakdown of cooperation. Our findings emphasize the significance of bot design in promoting cooperation and offer useful insights for encouraging cooperation in real-world scenarios.
合作在自然界和人类社会中都起着至关重要的作用，合作的难题引起了跨学科研究的关注。在这项研究中，我们通过引入简单的机器人，研究了可选囚徒困境游戏中合作的演变。我们专注于单次和匿名游戏，机器人可以被编程为始终合作、始终背叛、从不参与或均等概率选择每个动作。我们的结果表明，合作机器人在弱模仿情景下的均匀混合群体和规则晶格中促进了普通玩家之间合作的出现。引入孤独机器人对均匀混合群体中合作的出现没有影响，但在强模仿情景下，它促进了规则晶格中合作的主导地位。然而，规则晶格上过多的孤独机器人会抑制合作的传播，最终可能导致合作的崩溃。我们的研究结果强调了机器人设计在促进合作方面的重要性，并为鼓励现实场景中的合作提供了有用的见解。
