Deadlock & Leader as deformations of Prisoner’s dilemma & Hawk-Dove games

Recently, I’ve been working on revisions for our paper on measuring the games that cancer plays. One of the concerns raised by the editor is that we don’t spend enough time introducing game theory and in particular the Deadlock and Leader games that we observed. This is in large part due to the fact that these are not the most exciting games and not much theoretic efforts have been spent on them in the past. In fact, none that I know of in mathematical oncology.

With that said, I think it is possible to relate the Deadlock and Leader games to more famous games like Prisoner’s dilemma and the Hawk-Dove games; both that I’ve discussed at length on TheEGG. Given that I am currently at the Lorentz Center in Leiden for a workshop on Understanding Cancer Through Evolutionary Game Theory (follow along on twitter via #cancerEGT), I thought it’d be a good time to give this description here. Maybe it’ll inspire some mathematical oncologists to play with these games.

Cataloging a sparse year of blogging: IMO workshop and preprints

Happy 2018!

With 2017 finally behind us, TheEGG enters its 8th calendar year. This past year has been a slow one for the blog, with only 10 new articles and two posts cataloguing 2016 (on cancer and on more theoretical aspects of evolution and general modelling). Half the months were barren: I posted nothing in March, April, May, July, August, September; and only October and November saw more than one post. But those two months of activity were good. We saw the list of TheEGG authors joined by David Robert Grimes, Vincent Cannataro, and Matthew Wicker; plus the return of Robert Vander Velde.

If you’re keeping score at home, this means that I only wrote six new articles last year.

As in the past, I want to start the new year by summarizing the old.