Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
10481895 | Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications | 2013 | 9 Pages |
Abstract
The Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS) game is a widely used model system in game theory. Evolutionary game theory predicts the existence of persistent cycles in the evolutionary trajectories of the RPS game, but experimental evidence has remained to be rather weak. In this work, we performed laboratory experiments on the RPS game and analyzed the social-state evolutionary trajectories of twelve populations of N=6 players. We found strong evidence supporting the existence of persistent cycles. The mean cycling frequency was measured to be 0.029±0.009 period per experimental round. Our experimental observations can be quantitatively explained by a simple non-equilibrium model, namely the discrete-time logit dynamical process with a noise parameter. Our work therefore favors the evolutionary game theory over the classical game theory for describing the dynamical behavior of the RPS game.
Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering
Mathematics
Mathematical Physics
Authors
Bin Xu, Hai-Jun Zhou, Zhijian Wang,