New structure is discovered in the suggestive “world” created by Axelrod, which is based on iterated play of the Prisoner's Dilemma game, and was studied to reveal how cooperative behavior can arise in a world of egoists. One of Axelrod's conclusions is that the viability of a strategy depends on how heavily the future is discounted. Our results explain in additional detail the nature of this dependence and suggest how a specific cooperative strategy, tit-for-tat, might evolve from a world of defectors.
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