Another Quick Paper About Tags

From: Change Your Tags Fast!–A necessary condition for cooperation?
David Hales, 2004

I think this paper was on my "to read" pile as something which other papers were referring to. A quick glance over suggests that this is the study which tried to establish what the optimal ratio of mutations of tags vs strategies is for agents in a tag based system, such that they achieve optimal cooperation.

There is a benefit for tags to mutate much more often than strategies, it seems. This allows agents to form cooperative groups relatively easily by mutating into a group which then becomes successful. If the strategy mutation rate is too high by comparison, then cooperative groups will quickly be ripped apart by some of the cooperative members becoming defectors.

The outcome of this study seems to suggest the ratio should be about 10 to 1. As they note, this was actually an implicit assumption in earlier papers that didn't appear to be deliberate because of the way mutations were applied.

I've been spending some time over the last couple of days trying to add the papers I've been reading to my library at CiteULike to possibly make my life easier at a later date.