The Prisoner's Dilemma
Two people can each do better by betraying the other — and end up worse off than if neither of them had.
195018 min read
American political science
Robert Axelrod
1943
Political scientist at the University of Michigan. In 1980 he invited researchers to submit computer programs to play the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma against one another, ran two round-robin tournaments, and found that the simplest entry submitted - Anatol Rapoport's four-line TIT FOR TAT - won both. His 1984 book The Evolution of Cooperation turned the result into a research programme spanning biology, economics and international relations.