Evolutionary potential games on lattices

TL;DR

This paper explores the concept of potential games on lattices, connecting game theory with statistical physics to analyze ordering, phase transitions, and dynamics in multi-strategy evolutionary systems.

Contribution

It introduces a decomposition approach to classify potential games, relates them to kinetic Ising models, and extends analysis to non-potential cyclic dominance interactions.

Findings

Potential games can be decomposed into elementary matrices.

The systems exhibit phase transitions and slow relaxations similar to physical models.

Non-potential cyclic dominance introduces complex dynamics.

Abstract

Game theory provides a general mathematical background to study the effect of pair interactions and evolutionary rules on the macroscopic behavior of multi-player games where players with a finite number of strategies may represent a wide scale of biological objects, human individuals, or even their associations. In these systems the interactions are characterized by matrices that can be decomposed into elementary matrices (games) and classified into four types. The concept of decomposition helps the identification of potential games and also the evaluation of the potential that plays a crucial role in the determination of the preferred Nash equilibrium, and defines the Boltzmann distribution towards which these systems evolve for suitable types of dynamical rules. This survey draws parallel between the potential games and the kinetic Ising type models which are investigated for a wide scale of connectivity structures. We discuss briefly the applicability of the tools and concepts of statistical physics and thermodynamics. Additionally the general features of ordering phenomena, phase transitions and slow relaxations are outlined and applied to evolutionary games. The discussion extends to games with three or more strategies. Finally we discuss what happens when the system is weakly driven out of the "equilibrium state" by switching on non-potential components representing games of cyclic dominance.