Local-global coupling in strategy games: extracting signatures and unfolding dynamics

Complexity underlying life is largely governed by the dynamics of interactionwithin and between living and nonliving entities. Evolutionary strategy games are extensively used in modelling and understanding complex behaviors in a wide range of fields including theoretical biology, social interactions, economics, politics, defenseand security. Strategy games are said to distill the key elements of interactions be-tween real-world entities and organizations - one of the challenges lies in determiningthe mapping of complex real life situation dynamics to that of a certain game. Thatleads us to the two major research questions outlined below.In this thesis, we are taking evolutionary games a step further to investigatethe interplay between local and global dynamics, where local dynamics are repre-sented by locally pairwise interactions among the population's players governed bythe Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game. To represent the global dynamics, two mainmodelling ideas are proposed, in the first model; a mixed evolutionary game is in-troduced where players are competing globally on the population level in a minoritygame. The interplay between local and global dynamics in this model represents theinterplay between different scopes of competition between the same players. Sec-ondly, we introduce a model for studying the effect of sharing global informationconcerning a population of players, shedding light on how global information canalter the emerging dynamics of local interactions.Furthermore, the thesis addresses the question of whether games - with differentdynamics - have unique signatures (footprints) that can be used in recognizing anddifferentiating among them, and whether these footprints are consistent along theevolutionary path of these games. We show here that by building winning networksbetween players, and determining network motifs of these winning networks, wecan obtain motifs' counts signals that are sufficient to categorize and recognize thegame's utility matrix used by the players. We also demonstrate that these footprints- motifs' counts - are consistent along the evolutionary path of the games, due toa hyper-cyclic behavior that exists between strategies. Finally, we show that thisapproach is capable of identifying whether a certain population is driven by localdynamics or both local and global dynamics using the proposed mixed game