Pseudo-Static Cooperators: Moving Isn’t Always about Going Somewhere

The evolution of cooperation has long been studied in Game Theory and Evolutionary Biology. In this study, we inves-tigate the impact of movement control in a spatial version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma in a three dimensional space. A population of agents is evolved via an asynchronous genetic algorithm, to optimize their strategy. Our results show that cooperators rapidly join into static clusters, creating favor-able niches for fast replications. Surprisingly, even though re-maining inside those clusters, cooperators keep moving faster than defectors. We analyze the system dynamics to explain the stability of this behavior