I've written up a brief summary of all this here: https://vknight.org/2025/10/21/rrr.html

You can find a great talk from a few years ago from one of the other authors describing the process of reviving the work here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSFCvv2wpOU

#gametheory #cooperation #directreciprocity

In the preprint we show how after reviving the code to work with the modern framework for the study of the Prisoners Dilemma (the axelrod python library) we **almost** reproduce the results.

Following that we then explore what would happen if the original tournament was slightly different. The important finding of our work is how much the conclusions made were dependent on the original set of strategies: they created a very particular environment.

#gametheory #cooperation #directreciprocity

New preprint: "Reviving, reproducing, and revisiting Axelrod's second tournament"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15438

We have revived the original code [as much as possible] of Robert Axelrod's second 1980 tournament (the larger one).

This tournament was the one from which a large amount of research followed and where the legend of the effectiveness of Tit For Tat originated.

#gametheory #cooperation #directreciprocity