Dark selection from spatial cytokine signaling networks
November 30, 2017 3 Comments
Greetings, Theory, Evolution, and Games Group! It’s a pleasure to be on the other side of the keyboard today. Many thanks to Artem for the invite to write about some of our recent work and the opportunity to introduce myself via this post. I do a bit of blogging of my own over at vcannataro.com — mostly about neat science I stumble over while figuring out my way.
I’m a biologist. I study the evolutionary dynamics within somatic tissue, or, how mutations occur, compete, accumulate, and persist in our tissues, and how these dynamics manifest as aging and cancer (Cannataro et al., 2017a). I also study the evolutionary dynamics within tumors, and the evolution of resistance to targeted therapy (Cannataro et al., 2017b).
In November 2016 I attended the Integrated Mathematical Oncology Workshop on resistance, a workweek-long intensive competitive workshop where winners receive hard-earned $$ for research, and found myself placed in #teamOrange along with Artem. In my experience at said workshop (attended 2015 and 2016), things usually pan out like this: teams of a dozen or so members are assembled by the workshop organizers, insuring a healthy mix of background-education heterogeneity among groups, and then after the groups decide on a project they devise distinct but intersecting approaches to tackle the problem at hand. I bounced around a bit early on within #teamOrange contributing to our project where I could, and when the need for a spatially explicit model of cytokine diffusion and cell response came up I jumped at the opportunity to lead that endeavor. I had created spatially explicit cellular models before — such as a model of cell replacement in the intestinal crypt (Cannataro et al., 2016) — but never one that incorporated the diffusion or spread of some agent through the space. That seemed like a pretty nifty tool to add to my research kit. Fortunately, computational modeler extraordinaire David Basanta was on our team to teach me about modeling diffusion (thanks David!).
Below is a short overview of the model we devised.
Short history of iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournaments
March 2, 2015 by Artem Kaznatcheev 12 Comments
Nineteen Eighty — if I had to pick the year that computational modeling invaded evolutionary game theory then that would be it. In March, 1980 — exactly thirty-five years ago — was when Robert Axelrod, a professor of political science at University of Michigan, published the results of his first tournament for iterated prisoner’s dilemma in the Journal of Conflict Resolution. Game theory experts, especially those specializing in Prisoner’s dilemma, from the disciplines of psychology, political science, economics, sociology, and mathematics submitted 14 FORTRAN programs to compete in a round-robin tournament coded by Axelrod and his research assistant Jeff Pynnonen. If you want to relive these early days of evolutionary game theory but have forgotten FORTRAN and only speak Python then I recommend submitting a strategy to an analogous tournament by Vincent Knight on GitHub. But before I tell you more about submitting, dear reader, I want to celebrate the anniversary of Axelrod’s paper by sharing more about the original tournament.
Maybe it will give you some ideas for strategies.
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Filed under Commentary, Reviews, Simulation Tagged with evolution of cooperation, prisoner's dilemma, replicator dynamics, Robert Axelrod, video