Game changing game changes

‘Stochastic games’ can resolve Tragedy of the Commons

• Harvard University

All it took for rewriting the rules of understanding evolution of cooperation was a series of chance encounters between Martin Nowak, Krishnendu Chatterjee and Christian Hilbe.

Chatterjee, a computer science professor at IST Austria, mentioned the idea of stochastic games – games which can change based on players’ actions – during his first visit to Harvard in 2008, and the idea sent Nowak down a…

“People who study evolution of cooperation do not use stochastic games,” said Nowak, who developed the new framework in collaboration with Chatterjee, Hilbe, a post-doctoral fellow in Chatterjee’s group at IST, and…

• Game changing game…