Julia Poncela-Casasnovas
Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering
2145 Sheridan Road (Room E136)
Evanston, IL 60208-4057, US
Phone:
+1 847-491-7231Growing networks driven by the evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma game
Handbook of Optimization in Complex Networks 57, 115-136 (2011)
Abstract
In this chapter we present a model of growing networks in which the attachment
of nodes is driven by the dynamical state of the evolving network. In particular,
we study the interplay between form and function during network formation
by considering that the capacity of a node to attract new links from newcomers depends
on a dynamical variable: its evolutionary fitness. The fitness of nodes are governed
in turn by the payoff obtained when playing a weak Prisoner’s Dilemma game
with their nearest neighbors. Thus, we couple the structural evolution of the system
with its evolutionary dynamics which in turns has been shown to depend strongly
on the structural network patterns. On the one hand, we study both the levels of
cooperation observed during network evolution and the structural outcome of the
model. Our results point out that scale-free networks arise naturally in this setting
and that they present non-trivial topological attributes such as degree-degree correlations
and hierarchical clustering. On the other hand, we also look at the long-term
survival of the cooperation on top of these networks, once the growth has finished.
This mechanism points to an evolutionary origin of real complex networks and can
be straightforwardly applied to other kinds of dynamical networks problems.