Time and date: 4 March 2026 at 2:00 pm | Location: Abacws 4.35 | Speaker: Harry Foster
2032 has been identified as an estimate as the last chance to avoid irreversible changes to the climate. Despite this, international climate agreements, such as the Paris agreement and Kyoto protocol, continue to fail. As new climate measures are put into place, it is imperative to study the conditions under which they could succeed or fail. Bipartite cooperation has been the focus of a huge amount of study since Robert Axelrod’s seminal paper “The Evolution of Cooperation”. However, when studying larger scale problems, we require new methods of modelling systems. Thus, in this talk, we will discuss the Public Goods Game as an abstraction of international climate agreements. We will also discuss 3 standard algorithms for behavioural evolution, and 1 novel model. These will start with envious extrinsic decision making, basing decisions on the success of others. We will then discuss intrinsic decision making, aiming to improve strategies based on one’s own performance. This talk will provide results showing that the highest levels of cooperation are found under introspective processes, and will also show the conditions under which this occurs.
