New Tack Wins Prisoner's Dilemma

Wired News: : "its strategy involved a series of moves allowing players to recognize each other and act cooperatively."

I suspect that what this means is that there is further evidence to show that co-operation is an importnat part of evolution, not just competition. And note how it happened in the 'game': "Once two Southampton players recognized each other, they were designed to immediately assume "master and slave" roles -- one would sacrifice itself so the other could win repeatedly." One of the effect of this was that there were three winners but a whole load of their 'partners' were at the bottom of the pile. And the further intersting result was : "if we start off with a reasonable number of our colluders in the system, in the end everyone will be a colluder like ours,". Suggesting that collusion is a fundamental part of corporate life, in all likelihood. And the other interestiong thing is, "... to see how many colluders you need in a population. It turns out we had far too many -- we would have won with around 20."

This is important because it suggests that you need a critical mass of colluders but that once you have it you develop a system where some kind of co-operative behaviour is the norm. Now this has implications for thinking about ethics and justice. It also has implications for understanding human nature. In a God driven/shaped universe it is not unlikely that we might see that somehow things unfold [avoiding the E-word!] in ways that are reflective of and consonant with a unity-in-diversity Divinity; furhter; that the image of God is found, in part at least, in just such interdependence and mutual formation as emerges from individuality. In short I am suggeting that the universe is structured to bring unity our of diversity and co-operation/perichoresis out of 'selfishness' I think that perhaps it is to go too far to suggest full-on altruism emerges, but co-operation certainly.

It further seems to me that this is in some way related to the whole thing about the anthropic cosmological principle; in this case that the way the universe unfolds in relation to co-operation has a degree of necessity about it which almost suggests design. It could be seen as part of a final anthropic principle, I guess. This would be because at least by our experience of intelligence, it requires a reasonable degree of social construction to emerge. Intelligence is not for sollipsistic species. Thius, sociability needs to be wired in to produce the kind of intelligence that it sufficiently reflexive and reflective to be aware of the paradox that it appears to be both necessary and non-necessary.

I think I'll stop before it gets really confusing!