Complexity Digest 2010.12 - 03

2010/06/04

Editor-in-Chief: Carlos Gershenson
Founding Editor: Gottfried Mayer

Inductive Game Theory and the Dynamics of Animal Conflict, PLoS Comput Biol Bookmark and Share

Excerpt: Persistent conflict is one of the most important contemporary challenges to the integrity of society and to individual quality of life. Yet surprisingly little is understood about conflict. (...) Here we develop a new method, Inductive Game Theory, and apply it to a time series gathered from detailed observation of a primate society. We are able to determine which types of behavior are most likely to generate periods of intense conflict, and we find that fights are not explained by single, aggressive individuals, but by complex interactions among groups of three or higher. Understanding how memory and strategy affect conflict dynamics is a crucial step towards designing better methods for prediction, management and control.