13. A Coalitional Game of Life

This chapter introduces the interesting Conway’s Game of Life, describing first its simple rules; and then some static, oscillating and moving patters that emerge from the game iteration depending deterministically on its initial configuration. We also describe some Life properties concerning the complexity that emerges from simple local interactions, its capabilities for self-replicating patterns and several variants of this game described in the Life literature. Afterwards, a coalitional version of Life (CoaLife) is introduced as an upper layer, keeping the basic rules used by Life; and using new ones to create, modify or release coalitions along the game execution. Finally, we consider an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD) extension for CoaLife (IPD-CoaLife), as another upper layer over CoaLife, where alive cells play the IPD with their alive neighbors. As an illustrative example, we provide a comparison between an IPD-Life (without coalitions) and the IPD-CoaLife, where the latter shows a better cooperation level. The aim of this last chapter is to show how the combination of coalitions and classical game theory models allows to explore competition and cooperation among cells in complex and rich environments such as the Game of Life.