The Silent Cooperator: An Epigenetic Model for Emergence of Altruistic Traits in Biological Systems

Figure 4

An illustration of the update rules. A focal cell plays the prisoner’s dilemma game with cells in its extended Moore neighborhood; scores are weighted depending on the distance between the neighbor and the focal cell. After all cells in the grid are assigned fitness values, each cell competes with one random neighbor.

(a) The weights of the interactions between a focal cell and neighbor cells in an extended Moore’s neighborhood of radius 3

(b) A cell can have its position invaded by a randomly chosen cell from its simple Moore’s neighborhood, one chess king’s move from the focal cell, depending on the difference in fitness between the two cells