Coordinating team players within a noisy Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma tournament

Abstract

In this paper, we present our investigation into the use of a team of players within a noisy Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) tournament. We show that the members of such a team are able to use a pre-arranged sequence of moves that they make at the start of each interaction in order to recognise one another, and that by coordinating their actions they can increase the chances that one of the team members wins the round-robin style tournament. We consider, in detail, the factors that influence the performance of this team and we show that the problem that the team members face, when they attempt to recognise one another within the noisy IPD tournament, is exactly analogous to the problem, studied in information theory, of communicating reliably over a noisy channel. Thus we demonstrate that we can use error-correcting codes to implement this recognition, and by doing so, further optimise the performance of the team. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.