Convergence Analysis and Strategy Control of Evolutionary Games with Imitation Rule on Toroidal Grid: A Full Version

TL;DR

This paper provides the first rigorous convergence analysis of evolutionary games with imitation rules on two-dimensional toroidal grids, offering insights into strategy control and the influence of fixed nodes on the system's equilibrium.

Contribution

It proves convergence for multiple evolutionary games on grids and introduces strategy control methods, including the Minimum Agent Consensus Control problem.

Findings

Proves convergence of evolutionary prisoner's dilemma, snowdrift, and stag hunt games on grids.

Shows fixed defection node can lead all nodes to defection.

Demonstrates at least four fixed cooperation nodes are needed to ensure cooperation.

Abstract

This paper investigates discrete-time evolutionary games with a general stochastic imitation rule on the toroidal grid, which is a grid network with periodic boundary conditions. The imitation rule has been considered as a fundamental rule to the field of evolutionary game theory, while the grid is treated as the most basic network and has been widely used in the research of spatial (or networked) evolutionary games. However, currently the investigation of evolutionary games on grids mainly uses simulations or approximation methods, while few strict analysis is carried out on one-dimensional grids. This paper proves the convergence of evolutionary prisoner's dilemma, evolutionary snowdrift game, and evolutionary stag hunt game with the imitation rule on the two-dimensional grid, for the first time to our best knowledge. Simulations show that our results may almost reach the critical convergence condition for the evolutionary snowdrift (or hawk-dove, chicken) game. Also, this paper provides some theoretical results for the strategy control of evolutionary games, and solves the Minimum Agent Consensus Control (MACC) problem under some parameter conditions. We show that for some evolutionary games (like the evolutionary prisoner's dilemma) on the toroidal grid, one fixed defection node can drive all nodes almost surely converging to defection, while at least four fixed cooperation nodes are required to lead all nodes almost surely converging to cooperation.