Evolutionary Stable Strategy

In this paper it is shown that early human society could not have been organized as bands. The contrary, and apparently universal, conception among anthropologists is based on observations of contemporary hunter-gatherers who live in regions within which fertility cannot be fully expressed, due to severe resource limitations. This is a circumstance that is expected to lead to band organization because (as this paper shows) it is inconsistent with socially defined groupings based on genetic links by which territorial claims might be made. Early humans, on the other hand, are very likely to have competed for territory as their radiation proceeded, and local groups would find advantages in their relative demographic strength. Hence, the only available Evolutionary Stable Strategy requires that people organize around the benefits of fertility-as-wealth in some indeterminate form of intergenerational aggregation, as they struggled to maintain possession of (additional) territory in the c...

Context. Generating university course timetable is one of the most important tasks of managing the educational process. Growing requirements for the quality of education, a reduction in the material base and an increase in the number of specialties lead to the
need to optimize the process of using human resources, the classroom fund and to save energy resources. Since all the factors influencing the schedule are almost impossible to take into account and the interests of the participants in the educational process are diverse, the task of creating a schedule is multicriteria with a fuzzy set of factors. In this regard, the problem of automating the timetabling is still one of the urgent problems of the organization of the educational process.
Objective. The goal of the work is the improving the quality of university timetables and reducing the time it takes. The quality
of the schedule is determined by the extent to which the necessary and desirable requirements are met. It is necessary to provide possibility of expanding the desired requirements without changing the optimizing mechanism.
Method. To describe the processes of scheduling classes applied the methodology of constructive-production modeling. From
the point of view of constructivism: on the basis of a number of structures with a given structure and content, it is necessary to complete the construction of a schedule with a given structure and partly content. The development of the designer provides for the definition of expandable carrier, signatures of relations and operations, as well as information support. The most difficult and essential
part is the creation of a set of substitution rules, which define the output process of the corresponding constructions.
Results. Developed a university course timetabling constructor and software that implements the proposed method.
Conclusions. The experiments confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed approach and the software that implements the proposed method. This allows us to recommend it for use in practice in solving problems of scheduling classes.
KEYWORDS: timetabling, constructor, genetic algorithm, modeling.

A novel control ideology and technology for solving tasks in large distributed networked systems will be briefed. Based on active scenarios self-navigating and self-matching distributed spaces in a highly organized super-virus mode, it can effectively establish global control over large systems of any natures. The technology can use numerous scattered and dissimilar facilities in an integral and holistic way, allowing them to work together in goal-driven supercomputer mode. The approach can be useful for advanced air and missile defense in a variety of ways, some of which described and explained in this paper. The related material has been accepted for presentation at The 12th 3AF Integrated Air and Missile Defence international conference,

Understanding the evolution of cooperation as part of an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) is a difficult problem that has been the focus of much work. The associated costs of cooperation may lower the fitness of an organism below that of its non-cooperating counterpart, allowing the more fit organism to persist and outcompete the cooperator. Insight into these behaviors can help provide a better understanding of many aspects of the natural world, as well as provide future avenues for fighting disease. In this study, we use digital evolution to examine how the abundance of a required resource affects the cooperative production of a public good in an adverse environment. Evolutionary computation is an excellent tool for examining these problems, as it offers researchers complete access to organisms and total control over their environment. We find that stable cooperation can occur in otherwise competitive environments at discrete levels corresponding to the availability of a required resource. When resource levels are low, organisms focus solely on competitive behaviors. However, once resource levels cross a critical threshold, cooperation persists in populations. Further, this cooperation occurs in patches, where it is most likely to benefit relatives. Finally, we find that in some cases this cooperative behavior allows organisms to increase their competitive abilities as well.

Evolution of game strategies is studied in the Erroneous Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game, in which a player sometimes decides on an erroneous action contrary to his own strategy. Erroneous games of this kind have been known to lead to the evolution of a variety of strategies. This paper describes genetic fusion modeling as a particular source of new strategies. Successive actions are chosen according to strategies having finite memory capacity, and strategy algorithms are elaborated by genetic fusion. Such a fusion process introduces a rhizome structure in a genealogy tree. Emergence of module strategies functions as innovative source of new strategies. How the extinction of strategies and module evolution leads to ESS-free open-ended evolution is also discussed.

Rarely do human behavioral scientists and scholars study language, music, and other forms of communication as strategies—a means to some end. Some even deny that communication is the primary function of these phenomena. Here we draw upon selections of our earlier work to briefly define the strategy concept and sketch how decision theory, developed to explain the behavior of rational actors, is applied to evolved agents. Communication can then be interpreted as a strategy that advances the “fitness interests” of such agents. When this perspective is applied to agents with conflicts of interest, deception emerges as an important aspect of communication. We briefly review costly signaling, one solution to the problem of honest communication among agents with conflicts of interest. We also explore the subversion of cooperative signals by parasites and by plants defending themselves against herbivores, and we touch on biases in human gossip. Experiments with artificial embodied and commu...

Behavioural lateralization is widespread. Yet, a fundamental question remains, how can lateralization be evolutionary stable when individuals lateralized in one direction often significantly outnumber individuals lateralized in the opposite direction? A recently developed game theory model predicts that fitness consequences which occur during intraspecific interactions may be driving population-level lateralization as an evolutionary stable strategy. This model predicts that: (i) minority-type individuals exist because they are more likely to adopt unpredictable fighting behaviours during competitive interactions (e.g. fighting); and (ii) majority-type individuals exist because there is a fitness advantage in having their biases synchronized with other conspecifics during interactions that require coordination (e.g. mating). We tested these predictions by investigating biases in giant Australian cuttlefish during fighting and mating interactions. During fighting, most male cuttlefish favoured the left eye and these males showed higher contest escalation; but minority-type individuals with a right-eye bias achieved higher fighting success. During mating interactions, most male cuttlefish favoured the left eye to inspect females. Furthermore, most male cuttlefish approached the female's right side during a mating attempt and these males achieved higher mating success. Our data support the hypothesis that population-level biases are an evolutionary consequence of the fitness advantages involved in intraspecific interactions.

In this paper we study the notion of the Evolutionary Stable Strategies (ESS) in evolutionary games and we demonstrate their qualitative difference from the Nash Equilibria, by showing that a random evolutionary game has on average exponentially less number of ESS than the number of Nash Equilibria in the underlying symmetric 2-person game with random payoffs.

In this paper we study the support sizes of evolutionary stable strategies (ESS) in random evolutionary games. We prove that, when the elements of the payoff matrix behave either as uniform, or normally distributed independent random variables, almost all ESS have support sizes o(n), where n is the number of possible types for a player. Our arguments are based exclusively on the severity of a stability property that the payoff submatrix indicated by the support of an ESS must satisfy. We then combine our normal-random result with a recent result of McLennan and Berg (2005), concerning the expected number of Nash Equilibria in normal-random bimatrix games, to show that the expected number of ESS is significantly smaller than the expected number of symmetric Nash equilibria of the underlying symmetric bimatrix game.

The primary purpose of this paper is to highlight, for the research community and practitioners, the various aspects of using VMI-type supply chains in today's business environment as well as a number of directions for future studies. In this regard, fifty articles published in major international journals, beginning in 1995, which contribute to the VMI-type supply chains are reviewed via a systematic review methodology. Our findings show there is an incremental growth in employing of VMI strategies in logistic and supply chains. This paper characterizes the design aspects required to configure and establish a VMI-type supply chain in the industry including demand pattern, number of products, contract type between two parties, and profit sharing scheme. Moreover, the current gaps in the current state of VMItype supply chain in literature are highlighted in the last section of this paper that may motivate future studies.

Parasites are known to manipulate the behavior of their hosts in ways that increase their probability of transmission. Theoretically, different evolutionary routes can lead to host manipulation, but much research has concentrated on the 'manipulation hypothesis' sensu stricto. Among the arsenal of host compensatory responses, however, some seem to be compatible with the parasite objectives. Another way for parasites to achieve transmission, therefore, would be to trigger specific host compensatory responses. In order to explore the conditions favoring this manipulative strategy, we developed a simulation model in which parasites may affect their hosts' behavior by using two nonmutually exclusive strategies: a manipulation sensu stricto strategy and a strategy based on the exploitation of host compensatory responses. Our model predicts that the exploitation of host compensatory responses can be evolutionary stable when the alteration improves the susceptibility to predation by final hosts without compromising host survival during parasite development. Inversely, when the behavioral modification resulting from a compensatory response conflicts with the host's interest we expect parasites to use both strategies. From this result, we conclude that the strategy based on the exploitation of host compensatory responses should be more common among nontrophically transmitted parasites. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the transmission rate of parasites in a definitive host is highest when each of the two strategies affects different traits, which supports the hypothesis that host manipulation is a multidimensional phenomenon in which each altered trait contributes independently to increase parasite transmission efficiency.

Understanding the evolution of cooperation as part of an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) is a difficult problem that has been the focus of much work. The associated costs of cooperation may lower the fitness of an organism below that of its non-cooperating counterpart, allowing the more fit organism to persist and outcompete the cooperator. Insight into these behaviors can help provide a better understanding of many aspects of the natural world, as well as provide future avenues for fighting disease. In this study, we use digital evolution to examine how the abundance of a required resource affects the cooperative production of a public good in an adverse environment. Evolutionary computation is an excellent tool for examining these problems, as it offers researchers complete access to organisms and total control over their environment. We find that stable cooperation can occur in otherwise competitive environments at discrete levels corresponding to the availability of a required resource. When resource levels are low, organisms focus solely on competitive behaviors. However, once resource levels cross a critical threshold, cooperation persists in populations. Further, this cooperation occurs in patches, where it is most likely to benefit relatives. Finally, we find that in some cases this cooperative behavior allows organisms to increase their competitive abilities as well.

In this paper, we apply the concepts of Markov decision evolutionary games to non-cooperative forwarding control of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN). Specifically, we rely on the design of mechanisms at the source node to study forwarding probability of the message in a DTN using the twohop routing. We study the forwarding probability as a function of the competition within a large population of mobiles which need occasionally to make some action. In particular, for each message generated by a source, each mobile may take a decision that concerns the strategy by which the mobile participates to the relaying of the message from source to destination. A mobile that participates receives a unit of reward if it is the first to deliver a copy of the packet to the destination. The action taken by a mobile determine not only the immediate reward but also the transition probability to its next battery energy state. We characterize the Evolutionary Stable Strategies (ESS) for these games and propose a method to compute them. We also propose a mechanism design at the source in order to maximize the message delivery probability to the destination, given the equilibrium behavior (called Evolutionary Stable Strategy-ESS).

A genetic algorithm has been developed to solve bidding strategies in a dynamic multi-unit auction: the Ausubel auction, with independent private values and without dropout information. The genetic algorithm aims to maximize each bidder's payoff. To this end two experimental environments have been tested with decreasing and increasing marginal utilities. The bidding strategies are analyzed, along with their effects on revenue and efficiency. With decreasing marginal utilities the computational experiments yield to sincere bidding as the evolutionary-stable strategy, which is also the weakly dominant strategy and the ex post perfect equilibrium. Nevertheless, with increasing marginal utilities there is no theory model developed in order to find the equilibrium. Therefore, the challenge of this work is to study the auction outcome where theoretical predictions are unknown. The genetic algorithm finds bidding sincerely as the evolutionarystable strategy with increasing marginal utilities.

The increasing use of auctions has led to a growing interest in the subject. A recent method used for carrying out examinations on auctions has been the design of computational simulations. The aim of this paper is to develop a genetic algorithm to find bidders' optimal strategies for a specific dynamic multi-unit auction, The algorithm provides the bidding strategy (defined as the action to be taken under different auction conditions) that maximizes the bidder's payoff. The algorithm is tested under several experimental environments, number of bidders and quantity of lots auctioned. The results suggest that the approach leads to strategies that outperform canonical strategies This article has been financed by the Spanish founded research MCyT project TRACER, Ref: TIC2002-04498-C05-04

The increasing use of auctions as a selling mechanism has led to a growing interest in the subject. Thus both auction theory and experimental examinations of these theories are being developed. A recent method used for carrying out examinations on auctions has been the design of computational simulations. The aim of this article is to develop a genetic algorithm to find automatically a bidder optimal strategy while the other players are always bidding sincerely. To this end a specific dynamic multiunit auction has been selected: the Ausubel auction, with private values, dropout information, and with several rationing rules implemented. The method provides the bidding strategy (defined as the action to be taken under different auction conditions) that maximizes the bidder's payoff. The algorithm is tested under several experimental environments that differ in the elasticity of their demand curves, number of bidders and quantity of lots auctioned. The results suggest that the approach leads to strategies that outperform sincere bidding when rationing is needed.

We investigate under which conditions we can expect the evolution of costly male care for unrelated offspring, when the benefit of such care is in the form of increased mating success. This applies to male helping behavior that cannot be explained as paternal care because the male's own offspring does not benefit from his behavior. Our model shows that caring for others' offspring can be a stable strategy for males, if a male that does not ''help'' loses mating opportunities, for example if females discriminate against non-helping males as mating partners. This is possible when females are polyandrous. Increasing population density decreases the parameter region where male care is stable. Male care is also more likely to be stable when male mortality rate is higher than that of females. We discuss the results with special reference to the golden egg bug Phyllomorpha laciniata, where females lay eggs on conspecifics, often on males before mating. Males therefore carry mostly unrelated eggs. We investigate how oviposition rate and female mating rate influences when egg carrying is an evolutionary stable strategy. We conclude that in the golden egg bug, male egg carrying could be explained as a form of mating investment.

Consider a system of K particles moving on the vertex set of a finite connected graph with at most one particle per vertex. If there is one, the particle at x chooses one of the deg(x) neighbors of its location uniformly at random at rate ρx, and jumps to that vertex if and only if it is empty. Using standard probability techniques, we identify the set of invariant measures of this process to study the occupation time at each vertex. Our main result shows that, though the occupation time at vertex x increases with deg(x)/ρx, the ratio of the occupation times at two different vertices converges monotonically to one as the number of particles increases to the number of vertices. The occupation times are also computed explicitly for simple examples of finite connected graphs: the star and the path.

Yule and by Pearson himself in 1903 using a mendelian model. Acceptance followed later following Fisher (1918). Mendel's work was rediscovered when Galton was almost 80, but well before his death in 1911. Surely, if Galton had appreciated Mendel's results, he would have taken the quantitative genetic analysis further and would have also seen that a deficiency in his law of ancestral heredity (that it led to homogeneity) was simply met in 1908 by the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Animal and plant improvement programmes have been based successfully on statistical methods derived by Galton and used in the Mendelian genetic framework. Galton wanted to 'improve' the human population and indeed made a financial legacy to University College London to support the study of eugenics. His work has, however, been of great significance in the study of both human and natural populations, and Bulmer has done valuable service in showing how these evolved and can be interpreted. This book should appeal to those interested in the history of genetics, quantitative variation and applied statistics, and those wishing to understand the scientific origins of the eugenics movement.

In this paper it is shown that early human society could not have been organized as bands. The contrary, and apparently universal, conception among anthropologists is based on observations of contemporary hunter-gatherers who live in regions within which fertility cannot be fully expressed, due to severe resource limitations. This is a circumstance that is expected to lead to band organization because (as this paper shows) it is inconsistent with socially defined groupings based on genetic links by which territorial claims might be made. Early humans, on the other hand, are very likely to have competed for territory as their radiation proceeded, and local groups would find advantages in their relative demographic strength. Hence, the only available Evolutionary Stable Strategy requires that people organize around the benefits of fertility-as-wealth in some indeterminate form of intergenerational aggregation, as they struggled to maintain possession of (additional) territory in the context of social circumscription. While lineages, tribes and states are the most sophisticated forms of such aggregations, the author suggests the likelihood that early humans might have possessed other forms that are ethnographically unknown.

Many mathematical models for the spread of infectious diseases in a population assume homogeneous mixing, but due to spatial distribution, there exist distinct patches with unique disease dispersion dynamics, especially if between patch mixing due to travel and migration is limited. In this paper, three levels of disease status in a-patch metapopulation was studied using a simple SIR-HIV epidemic model in a one dimensional nearest neighbour coupling lattice. The basic reproductive ratio 0 (), which is a function of coupling strength , is shown to affect stability characteristics of equilibrium points. The disease free equilibrium (DFE) is globally asymptotically stable irrespective of the value of but the stability of the endemic equilibrium point (EEP) depends on the coupling strength. It was found that at the critical value of coupling strength ≥ 0.67, the subpopulations dynamics are synchronized while for ≤ 0.3 the subpopulation dynamics are independent. Patch isolation strategy for the control of HIV dispersion requires a critical coupling strength of ≤ 0.15. This interaction restriction reduces 0 to values less than one, and the disease will be eliminated, making isolation effective. Demographic and epidemiological parameters of Vihiga County in Kenya were used in the study.

Aggressive behaviour between females of the same species is not widely documented, particularly in marine vertebrates. During a 3 yr in-water survey at the temperate loggerhead sea turtle Caretta caretta breeding area of Zakynthos, Greece, female-female interactions comprised 4% of all female loggerhead sighting events (n = 60 out of 1449 events). Male-female interactions comprised an additional 4% of sighting events, while 92% were of solitary females. The structure of interactions was analysed for 58 of these sighting events, each lasting an average of 3.4 min (SD ± 1) and comprising a total of 3.1 h observation time. We found that interactions involved ritualized escalation in behaviour from passive threat displays (e.g. head-tail circling) to aggressive combat (e.g. sparring). We suggest that circling individuals evaluate opponent size, sparring individuals test opponent strength, and that the positioning of the prehensile tail signals motivational intent to either escalate or abort. The presence of intruder females triggered a passive response in 100% of events involving basking and swimming turtles (n = 19); although residents resting on the seabed only responded on 69% of occasions (n = 27), their response was almost 4 times more likely to escalate to one of aggression. Our results suggest that certain sites may be preferentially sought after and defended by sea turtles.

A major contribution of biology to competitive decision making is the area of evolutionary games. It describes the evolution of sizes of large populations as a result of many local interactions, each involving a small number of randomly selected individuals. An individual plays only once; it plays in a one shot game against another randomly selected player with the goal of maximizing its utility (fitness) in that game. We introduce here a new more general type of games: a Stochastic Evolutionary Game where each player may be in different states; the player may be involved in several local interactions during his life time and his actions determine not only the utilities but also the transition probabilities and his life duration. This is used to study a large population of mobiles forming a sparse ad-hoc network, where mobiles compete with their neighbors on the access to a radio channel. We study the impact of the level of energy in the battery on the aggressiveness of the access policy of mobiles at equilibrium. We obtain properties of the ESS (Evolutionary Stable Strategy) equilibrium which, Unlike the Nash equilibrium concept, is robust against deviations of a whole positive fraction of the population. We further study dynamical properties of the system when it is not in equilibrium.

We study a Modified Multiple Access Game (MMAG) in two approach: repeated game approach and evolutionary game approach. We compute Nash equilibria and Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) in the two cases. We study the delay impact on the performance of the evolutionary MMAG describing competition between mobile terminals over the access to a channel. We discuss about the convergence to the ESS in replicator dynamics and imitate better dynamics with delays.

In this paper we study evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) in contests where participation is stochastic. We find under ESS players exert more effort than under Nash for given participation probabilities. We show that with ESS there is ex-ante overdissipation for sufficiently large participation probability and sufficiently high discriminative power of the contest success function. With costly endogenous entry, players are also more likely to enter the contest, and hence they incur higher total cost and obtain lower absolute payoff under ESS than Nash. Ex-ante overdissipation also occurs for concave impact functions. From a contest designer's point of view, implementing ESS induces players to exert higher total effort and thus yields higher total expected revenue. * The authors would like to thank Xiaogang Che, Marek Hudik, as well as seminar participants at the Lancaster Game Theory Conference 2016 and at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University for helpful comments. Burkhard Hehenkamp gratefully acknowledges financial support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through CRC 901 "On-The-Fly Computing."

We study evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) in contests where participation is stochastic. When participation probabilities are given, players exert more effort In ESS than under Nash. Ex-ante overdissipation occurs when participation is suff. likely and discriminative power of the contest suff. high. When entry is costly and endogenous, players’ entry is more likely, more costly, and less profitable in ESS than under Nash. Ex-ante overdissipation also occurs for concave impact functions.

The strategy of integration known as VMI (Vendor-Managed Inventory) allows the coordination of inventory policies between producers and buyers in supply chains. Based on a new proposed model for the implementation of VMI in a chain of two links composed of a producer and a buyer, this paper studies the evolution of individual strategies of the producer and the buyer by a formalism derived from the theory of evolutionary games. The conditions that determine the stability of evolutionarily stable strategies are derived and analyzed. Work results specify analytical conditions that favor the implementation of VMI on traditional chains without VMI.

The role of mesozooplankton grazers in the development of monospecific algal blooms has often been examined in a scenario in which grazers, depending on their abilities of recognition, select against toxic species and increase grazing pressure on non-toxic species. Here, we present a different ecological scenario in which grazers may select between different strains (toxic and nontoxic) of the same species, which may coexist in similar densities in natural environments prior to bloom initiation. The calanoid copepod Acartia clausi was fed with single and mixed diets of 2 strains of the dinoflagellate Alexandrium minutum, a producer of paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) toxins. One strain produced high, and the other low, quantities of PSP toxins. We examined feeding strategies and estimated copepod responses based on their food selection abilities, toxic effects on maintenance physiology and fitness, and benefits produced by a toxin-dilution strategy in a mixed diet. Copepods were found to feed selectively on A. minutum strains. Diet composition had a strong effect on parameters such as food ingestion, mortality, egg hatching, and egg production. The effect on copepod mortality and egg production was greatly reduced when a mixed diet (toxic + non-toxic) was provided to the copepods. However, the negative effects on egg hatching were dose-dependent, and this parameter was not recovered by toxin-dilution mechanisms. We conclude that copepods did not effectively reject the toxic strain and that the effect of A. minutum on mortality and egg production, but not on egg hatching, is reduced by dilution mechanisms. Therefore, we suggest that feeding pressure by grazers does not appear to be an important mechanism that favors toxic over non-toxic strains prior to bloom initiation.

The role of mesozooplankton grazers in the development of monospecific algal blooms has often been examined in a scenario in which grazers, depending on their abilities of recognition, select against toxic species and increase grazing pressure on non-toxic species. Here, we present a different ecological scenario in which grazers may select between different strains (toxic and nontoxic) of the same species, which may coexist in similar densities in natural environments prior to bloom initiation. The calanoid copepod Acartia clausi was fed with single and mixed diets of 2 strains of the dinoflagellate Alexandrium minutum, a producer of paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) toxins. One strain produced high, and the other low, quantities of PSP toxins. We examined feeding strategies and estimated copepod responses based on their food selection abilities, toxic effects on maintenance physiology and fitness, and benefits produced by a toxin-dilution strategy in a mixed diet. Copepods were found to feed selectively on A. minutum strains. Diet composition had a strong effect on parameters such as food ingestion, mortality, egg hatching, and egg production. The effect on copepod mortality and egg production was greatly reduced when a mixed diet (toxic + non-toxic) was provided to the copepods. However, the negative effects on egg hatching were dose-dependent, and this parameter was not recovered by toxin-dilution mechanisms. We conclude that copepods did not effectively reject the toxic strain and that the effect of A. minutum on mortality and egg production, but not on egg hatching, is reduced by dilution mechanisms. Therefore, we suggest that feeding pressure by grazers does not appear to be an important mechanism that favors toxic over non-toxic strains prior to bloom initiation.

Social insects, i.e. ants, bees, wasps and termites, are key components of ecological communities, and are important ecosystem services (ESs) providers. Here, we review the literature in order to (i) analyse the particular traits of social insects that make them good suppliers of ESs; (ii) compile and assess management strategies that improve the services provided by social insects; and (iii) detect gaps in our knowledge about the services that social insects provide. Social insects provide at least 10 ESs; however, many of them are poorly understood or valued. Relevant traits of social insects include high biomass and numerical abundance, a diversity of mutualistic associations, the ability to build important biogenic structures, versatile production of chemical defences, the simultaneous delivery of several ESs, the presence of castes and division of labour, efficient communication and cooperation, the capacity to store food, and a long lifespan. All these characteristics enhance social insects as ES providers, highlighting their potential, constancy and efficiency as suppliers of these services. In turn, many of these traits make social insects stress tolerant and easy to manage, so increasing the ESs they provide. We emphasise the need for a conservation approach to the management of the services, as well as the potential use of social insects to help restore habitats degraded by human activities. In addition, we stress the need to evaluate both services and disservices in an integrated way, because some species of social insects are among the most problematic invasive species and native pests. Finally, we propose two areas of research that will lead to a greater and more efficient use of social insects as ES providers, and to a greater appreciation of them by producers and decision-makers.

Because of the sustained growth of information and mobile users transmitting a great amount of data packets, modern network performances are being seriously affected by congestion problems. In fact, congestion management is a challenging task that can be roughly summarized as a trade off between transmission latency and cost. In order to contribute to solve the congestion problem on communication networks, a novel framework based on a quantum game model is proposed, where network packets compete selfishly for their fastest route. Simulations show that final network routing and traveling times achieved with the quantum version outperform those obtained with a classical game model with the same options for packet transmission for both. Pareto optimality and Nash equilibrium are studied as well as the influence of simulated and real noise in the quantum protocol. This leads to the opportunity of developing full-stack protocols that may be capable of taking advantage of the quantum prop...

The next generation of wireless networks (4G) will use OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) in the reverse link. In OFDMA, the reverse link resources assigned to a user are called tiles each of which consists of a subset of consecutive subcarriers. Since at most one user is assigned to each of these tiles then reverse link transmissions within a sector are orthogonal. However, the transmission is affected by intercell interference since users in adjacent sectors may also have been assigned to the same tile. If those users in the adjacent sectors transmitted with high power then the intercell interference may severely limit the SINR achieved by the user. Therefore user transmission powers must be carefully managed to avoid excessive intercell interference. In this paper we propose a distributed algorithm for the problem and use numerical results to illustrate its performance.

Moral rules allow humans to cooperate by indirect reciprocity. Yet, it is not clear which moral rules best implement indirect reciprocity and are favoured by natural selection. Previous studies either considered only public assessment, where individuals are deemed good or bad by all others, or compared a subset of possible strategies. Here we fill this gap by identifying which rules are evolutionary stable strategies (ESS) among all possible moral rules while considering private assessment. We develop an analytical model describing the frequency of long-term cooperation, determining when a strategy can be invaded by another. We show that there are numerous ESSs in absence of errors, which however cease to exist when errors are present. We identify the underlying properties of cooperative ESSs. Overall, this paper provides a first exhaustive evolutionary invasion analysis of moral rules considering private assessment. Moreover, this model is extendable to incorporate higher-order rules and other processes.

Association graphs represent a classical tool to deal with the graph matching problem and recently the idea has been generalized to the case of hypergraphs. In this article, the potential of this approach is explored. The proposed framework uses a class of dynamical systems derived from the Baum-Eagon inequality in order to find the maximum (maximal) clique in the association hypergraph, that corresponds to the maximum (maximal) isomorphism between the hypergraphs to be matched. The proposed approach has extensively been tested with experiments on a large synthetic dataset, including hypergraphs of different cardinalities, order and connectivities. In particular the isomorphism version of the problem has been analyzed. The results obtained are impressive in terms of correctness, thus showing that, despite its simplicity, the Baum-Eagon dynamics has an outstanding capacity of finding globally optimal solutions and solving the hypergraph isomorphism problem.

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a very common algorithm in swarm intelligence algorithms. PSO has been used to solve a lot of problems with one or more goals. Actuality, the multi-objectives improvement issues in all real life are combinatorial in nature. Therefore, PSO has been improved to be able to handle very large number of decision variables and reduce or decrease computational complexity. In this work, a chaos multi objective PSO algorithm is improved for solving discrete (binary) optimization issues with crossover operation. The developed Chaos Discrete Multi Objective PSO (CDMOPSO) algorithm is applied to pavement management problem for flexible pavement to get optimal maintenance and rehabilitation plan. The results shown that there is significant improvement in the solutions satisfying pavement conditions and maintenance cost goals. It is required to a very short time of execution by the improved algorithm to reach a very good solution. Also, comparing the convergence of solutions with the rest of the PSO algorithms, it has found that the suggested algorithm is better.

The strategy of integration known as VMI (Vendor-Managed Inventory) allows the coordination of inventory policies between producers and buyers in supply chains. Based on a new proposed model for the implementation of VMI in a chain of two links composed of a producer and a buyer, this paper studies the evolution of individual strategies of the producer and the buyer by a formalism derived from the theory of evolutionary games. The conditions that determine the stability of evolutionarily stable strategies are derived and analyzed. Work results specify analytical conditions that favor the implementation of VMI on traditional chains without VMI.

The classical Fisher-Cochran theorem is a fundamental result in many areas of statistics as analysis of variance and hypothesis tests. In general this theorem is proved with linear algebraic arguments. An elementary proof is present, based strongly on geometrical concepts as linear subspaces and orthogonal projections, which may improve our intuition about the result.

The following additional references are organised in sections corresponding to those in the main text. They represent examples only, and are chosen mainly to amplify those already cited in the main text. Gamete (proto-sperm) competition and evolution of two sexes Theory: Graphical models of isogamy and anisogamy as evolutionarily stable strategies Maynard Smith, J. 1982 Evolution and the theory of games. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Isogamy instability Matsuda, H. & Abrams, P. A. 1999 Why are equally sized gametes so rare? The instability of isogamy and the cost of anisogamy. Evol Ecol Res 1, 769-784. Importance of zygote provisioning in determining whether isogamy or anisogamy is an evolutionarily stable strategy

Executive Summary Data availability is a key aspect in QLectives, since it drives the project's workflow, organized along the closed cycle formed by the four streams (Models and hypothesis; algorithms and simulations; empirical focus; implementation and deployment). This makes a requirement to have a common and standardized repository of datasets for all partners to share. The “Living-archive” is aimed to fulfil such a requirement.

In many nectarless flowering plants, pollen serves as both the carrier of male gametes and as food for pollinators. This can generate an evolutionary conflict if the use of pollen as food by pollinators reduces the number of gametes available for cross‐fertilization. Heteranthery, the production of two or more stamen types by individual flowers reduces this conflict by allowing different stamens to specialize in ‘pollinating’ and ‘feeding’ functions. We used experimental studies of Solanum rostratum (Solanaceae) and theoretical models to investigate this ‘division of labour’ hypothesis. Flight cage experiments with pollinating bumble bees (Bombus impatiens) demonstrated that although feeding anthers are preferentially manipulated by bees, pollinating anthers export more pollen to other flowers. Evolutionary stability analysis of a model of pollination by pollen consumers indicated that heteranthery evolves when bees consume more pollen than should optimally be exchanged for visitati...

SUMMARY The document is concerned with paradigms in game theory, statistical physics and their potential applications to BIONETS architecture, protocols and services. It presents both our theoretical contributions to those paradigms as well as alternative contributions that mainly apply to these paradigms. The deliverable contains 6 chapters; two on game theory and four on physics and related paradigms. The game theory part includes contributions to the fundamentals of game theory which we have developed for the context of ...

The original rent seeking game devised by Tullock, whereby the probability of winning a rentseeking contest is a function of the rent seeking expenditures raiseá to the power R, is solved for any value of R~0. In particular, we show that a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium exists when R 1 2. The possibility of over dissipation of rents-which was conjectured in the early literature for the case where R~2-dces not arise in any Nash equilibrium. We provide a tight bound on the amount of under dissipation of rents that arises in a symmetric equilibrium. This bound explains earlier experimental work which could not be rationalized before. General representations of symmetric Nash equilibrium mixed strategies are provided, as well as numerical examples based on values of R 1 2 used in some of the recent experimental literature.