Spatial reciprocity under reinforcement learning mechanism

At present, the research on the dynamics of cooperative behavior of agents under reinforcement learning mechanism either assumes that agents have global interaction, that is, agents interact with all other agents in the population, or directly study the influence of relevant factors on cooperation evolution based on the local interaction in a network structure. It neglects to formally study how the limitation of agents that only interact with local agents affects their strategy choice. Thus, in this paper, we study the cooperative behavior of agents in a typical social decision-making environment with conflicts between individual interests and collective interests. On the one hand, a programmed game model in game theory, namely, prisoner’s dilemma game, is used to capture the essence of real-world dilemmas. On the other hand, the effects of local and global strategy learning on the cooperative evolution of agents are investigated separately, and the nature of spatial reciprocity under the reinforcement learning mechanism is found. Specifically, when there is no inherent connection between the interacting agents and the learning agents within the system, the network structure has a limited effect on promoting cooperation. It is only when there is an overlap between the interacting agents and the learning agents that the spatial reciprocity effect observed in the traditional evolutionary game theory can be fully realized.