TURAN: Evolving non-deterministic players for the iterated prisoner's dilemma

The iterated prisoner's dilemma is a widely known model in game theory, fundamental to many theories of cooperation and trust among self-interested beings. There are many works in literature about developing efficient strategies for this problem, both inside and outside the machine learning community. This paper shift the focus from finding a “good strategy” in absolute terms, to dynamically adapting and optimizing the strategy against the current opponent. Turan evolves competitive non-deterministic models of the current opponent, and exploit them to predict its moves and maximize the payoff as the game develops. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to obtain good performances against different kind of opponent, whether their strategies can or cannot be implemented as finite state machines.