Cyclic dominance in evolutionary games: a review

By Attila Szolnoki, Mauro Mobilia, Luo-Luo Jiang, Bartosz Szczesny, Alastair M. Rucklidge, Matjaz Perc. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 2014

485 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Rock is wrapped by paper, paper is cut by scissors and scissors are crushed by rock. This simple game is popular among children and adults to decide on trivial disputes that have no obvious winner, but cyclic dominance is also at the heart of predator–prey interactions, the mating strategy of side-blotched lizards, the overgrowth of marine sessile organisms and competition in microbial populations. Cyclical interactions also emerge spontaneously in evolutionary games entailing volunteering, reward, punishment, and in fact are common when the competing strategies are three or more, regardless of the particularities of the game. Here, we review recent advances on the rock–paper–scissors (RPS) and related evolutionary games, focusing, in particular, on pattern formation, the impact of mobility and the spontaneous emergence of cyclic dominance. We also review mean-field and zero-dimensional RPS models and the application of the complex Ginzburg–Landau equation, and we highlight the importance and usefulness of statistical physics for the successful study of large-scale ecological systems. Directions for future research, related, for example, to dynamical effects of coevolutionary rules and invasion reversals owing to multi-point interactions, are also outlined.

Subfields: Genetics, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0e1738b544834e237b36362b0fafca98d712972d

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Citations in the corpus

Re-evaluating evaluation (2018, background): “Intransitivity has been linked to biodiversity in ecology, and may be useful when evolving populations of agents [18–21].”
Networks beyond pairwise interactions: structure and dynamics (2020, background): “[521] Attila Szolnoki, Mauro Mobilia, Luo-Luo Jiang, Bartosz Szczesny, Alastair M Rucklidge, and Matjaž Perc.”
Stochastic population dynamics in spatially extended predator–prey systems (2017, methodology): “While this approach is valid when ǫ≪ 1, it also provides significant insight into the system’s spatio–temporal properties away from the Hopf bifurcation (when μ≪ μH) [67, 68, 148, 69]: • For μ .”
Statistical physics of human cooperation (2017, background): “In addition to continuous phase transitions, discontinuous phase transitions are also common in models of human cooperation, occurring for example as a consequence of indirect territorial competition [110], or the spontaneous emergence of cyclic dominance [60,192].”