Emergence of Cooperation in the thermodynamic limit

TL;DR

This paper explores how cooperative behavior naturally emerges in large populations by drawing an analogy with the Ising model, addressing a key challenge in evolutionary game theory.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using the Ising model analogy to predict cooperation emergence in the thermodynamic limit.

Findings

Cooperation becomes the dominant behavior in large populations.

The Ising model analogy effectively predicts cooperation patterns.

The approach bridges evolutionary game theory and statistical physics.

Abstract

Predicting how cooperative behavior arises in the thermodynamic limit is one of the outstanding problems in evolutionary game theory. For two player games, cooperation is seldom the Nash equilibrium. However, in the thermodynamic limit cooperation is the natural recourse regardless of whether we are dealing with humans or animals. In this work, we use the analogy with the Ising model to predict how cooperation arises in the thermodynamic limit.