Error-Correcting Codes for Team Coordination within a Noisy Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournament

The mechanism by which cooperation arises within populations of selfish individuals has generated significant research within the biological, social and computer sciences. Much of this interest derives from the original research of Axelrod and Hamilton, and, in particular, the two computer tournaments that Axelrod organised in order to investigate successful strategies for playing the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD). These tournaments were so significant as they demonstrated that a simple strategy based on reciprocity, namely tit-for-tat, was extremely effective in promoting and maintaining cooperation when playing against a wide range of seemingly more complex opponents. To mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication of this work, these two computer tournaments were recently recreated (see http://www. prisoners-dilemma.com/) with separate events being hosted at the 2004 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computing (CEC’04) and the 2005 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG’05). To stimulate novel research, the rules of Axelrod’s original tournaments were extended in two key ways. Firstly, noise was introduced, whereby the moves of each player would be mis-executed with some small probability. Secondly, and most significantly, researchers were invited to enter more than one player into the round-robin style tournament. This second extension to the original rules, prompted several researchers to enter teams of players