Programming Challenge 4:
Iterated Prisoners Dilemma

Here you get to be an ethnographer without worrying about any of the difficulties of working in a real field or clinical situation: no expenses, no culture shock, no moral or ethical issues to contend with. You are omniscient. You can create the culture in any way you like. You can peer into each agent's relationships. You have access to, and control of, everything in their world...

EXPERIMENT AND EXPLAIN

Which cultural ecologies favor, and which mitigate against, particular strategies?
a) Experiment with different scenarios. What happens with different populations?
b) Explain why you get these results? Try to reason them out.
c) Screen captures would be quite useful.

MODIFY

How might you modify and improve the simulation?
a) Did you find any program bugs?
b) Propose some modifications.
c) Express them in pseudocode and/or implement them in the simulation.
d) One might wish to limit the run to only a few games in order to detect differences between local and global memory.
e) By now, you should be able to add a box to show the final total score for the entire population in order to study the question of how to maximize community payoffs. So make that modification, at least.

NOTE
The three demos shown in class were based on these ecologies:
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