The effects of population size and information update rates on the emergent patterns of cooperative clusters in a large-scale social particle swarm model

We study the impact of network size in the context of interactions within social network services (SNS) on cooperation among its users, as well as that of the speed of information update about other neighbors during interaction, using an enhanced version of a swarm model that uses prisoner’s dilemma as social interaction strategy and that models users’ interactions through kinematics. We focus on the speed of information update about social environments and study the relationships between the resulting patterns of cooperation in different information update rates. We observed the large variations among emerging many cooperative clusters in size, speed, and cooperation rate in the large population. Moreover, cooperation was more promoted when the information update rate was high, in contrast to low update rate where the population converged to a few large clusters with many wandering defectors.