Disordered environments in spatial games - art. no. 051905

The Prisoner's dilemma is the main game theoretical framework in which the onset and maintainance of cooperation in biological populations is studied. In the spatial version of the model, we study the robustness of cooperatio n in heterogeneous ecosystems in spatial evolutionary games by considering site diluted lattices. The main result is that, due to disorder, the fracti on of cooperators in the population is enhanced. Moreover, the system prese nts a dynamical transition at rho*, separating a region with spatial chaos from one with localized, stable groups of cooperators.