## Ontology of player & evolutionary game in reductive vs effective theory

In my views of game theory, I largely follow Ariel Rubinstein: game theory is a set of fables. A collection of heuristic models that helps us structure how we make sense of and communicate about the world. Evolutionary game theory was born of classic game theory theory through a series of analogies. These analogies are either generalizations or restrictions of the theory depending on if you’re thinking about the stories or the mathematics. Given this heuristic genealogy of the field — and my enjoyment of heuristic models — I usually do not worry too much about what exactly certain ontic terms like strategy, player, or game really mean or refer to. I am usually happy to leave these terms ambiguous so that they can motivate different readers to have different interpretations and subsequently push for different models of different experiments. I think it is essential for heuristic theories to foster this diverse creativity. Anything goes.

However, not everyone agrees with Ariel Rubinstein and me; some people think that EGT isn’t “just” heuristics. In fact, more recently, I have also shifted some of my uses of EGT from heuristics to abductions. When this happens, it is no longer acceptable for researchers to be willy-nilly with fundamental objects of the theory: strategies, players, and games.

The biggest culprit is the player. In particular, a lot of confusion stems from saying that “cells are players”. In this post, I’d like to explore two of the possible positions on what constitutes players and evolutionary games.

## Cataloging a year of cancer blogging: double goods, measuring games & resistance

Happy year of the Rooster and 2017,

This month marks the start of the 7th calendar year of updates on TheEGG. Time to celebrate and summarize the posts of the year past. In 2016 there was the same number of posts as 2015, but instead of being clustered in a period of <7 months, they were more uniformly distributed across the calendar. Every month had at least one new post, although not necessarily written by me (in the case of the single post by Abel Molina in October). There were 29 entries, one linkdex cataloging 2015, and two updates on EGT reading group 51 – 55 & 56 – 60.

In September, as part of my relocation from Tampa to Oxford, I attended the 4th Heidelberg Laureate Forum. I wrote two pieces for their blog: Alan Turing and science through the algorithmic lens and a spotlight on Jan Poleszczuk: from HLF2013 to mathematical oncology. You can read those (and more posts coming this year) on their blog. I won’t go into more detail here.

As before, this post is meant to serve as an organizing reference and a way to uncover common themes on TheEGG. A list of TL;DRs from 2016. The year was split up into four major categories: cancer, complexity & evolution, other models, and philosophy. The cancer posts make up almost half the articles from last year, and are further subdivided into three subsections: double goods game, experimental game theory, and therapy resistance. I want to focus on these cancer posts for this linkdex, and the other three categories in the next installment.

## Multiple realizability of replicator dynamics

Abstraction is my favorite part of mathematics. I find a certain beauty in seeing structures without their implementations, or structures that are preserved across various implementations. And although it seems possible to reason through analogy without (explicit) abstraction, I would not enjoy being restricted in such a way. In biology and medicine, however, I often find that one can get caught up in the concrete and particular. This makes it harder to remember that certain macro-dynamical properties can be abstracted and made independent of particular micro-dynamical implementations. In this post, I want to focus on a particular pet-peeve of mine: accounts of the replicator equation.

I will start with a brief philosophical detour through multiple realizability, and discuss the popular analogy of temperature. Then I will move on to the phenomenological definition of the replicator equation, and a few realizations. A particular target will be the statement I’ve been hearing too often recently: replicator dynamics are only true for a very large but fixed-size well-mixed population.

## Choosing units of size for populations of cells

Recently, I have been interacting more and more closely with experiment. This has put me in the fortunate position of balancing the design and analysis of both theoretical and experimental models. It is tempting to think of theorists as people that come up with ideas to explain an existing body of facts, and of mathematical modelers as people that try to explain (or represent) an existing experiment. But in healthy collaboration, theory and experiment should walk hand it hand. If experiments pose our problems and our mathematical models are our tools then my insistence on pairing tools and problems (instead of ‘picking the best tool for the problem’) means that we should be willing to deform both for better communication in the pair.

Evolutionary game theory — and many other mechanistic models in mathematical oncology and elsewhere — typically tracks population dynamics, and thus sets population size (or proportions within a population) as central variables. Most models think of the units of population as individual organisms; in this post, I’ll stick to the petri dish and focus on cells as the individual organisms. We then try to figure out properties of these individual cells and their interactions based on prior experiments or our biological intuitions. Experimentalists also often reason in terms of individual cells, making them seem like a natural communication tool. Unfortunately, experiments and measurements themselves are usually not about cells. They are either of properties that are only meaningful at the population level — like fitness — or indirect proxies for counts of individual cells — like PSA or intensity of fluorescence. This often makes counts of individual cells into an inferred theoretical quantity and not a direct observable. And if we are going to introduce an extra theoretical term then parsimony begs for a justification.

But what is so special about the number of cells? In this post, I want to question the reasons to focus on individual cells (at the expense of other choices) as the basic atoms of our ontology.

## Measuring games in the Petri dish

For the next couple of months, Jeffrey Peacock is visiting Moffitt. He’s a 4th year medical student at the University of Central Florida with a background in microbiology and genetic engineering of bacteria and yeast. Together with Andriy Marusyk and Jacob Scott, he will move to human cells and run some in vitro experiments with non-small cell lung cancer — you can read more about this on Connecting the Dots. Robert Vander Velde is also in the process of designing some experiments of his own. Both Jeff and Robert are interested in evolutionary game theory, so this is great opportunity for me to put my ideas on operationalization of replicator dynamics into practice.

In this post, I want to outline the basic process for measuring a game from in vitro experiments. Games in the Petri-dish. It won’t be as action packed as Agar.io — that’s an actual MMO cells-in-Petri-dish game; play here — but hopefully it will be more grounded in reality. I will introduce the gain function, show how to measure it, and stress the importance of quantifying the error on this measurement. Since this is part of the theoretical preliminaries for my collaborations, we don’t have our own data to share yet, so I will provide an illustrative cartoon with data from Archetti et al. (2015). Finally, I will show what sort of data would rule-out the theoretician’s favourite matrix games and discuss the ego-centric representation of two-strategy matrix games. The hope is that we can use this work to go from heuristic guesses at what sort of games microbes or cancer cells might play to actually measuring those games.

## Abusing numbers and the importance of type checking

What would you say if I told you that I could count to infinity on my hands? Infinity is large, and I have a typical number of fingers. Surely, I must be joking. Well, let me guide you through my process. Since you can’t see me right now, you will have to imagine my hands. When I hold out the thumb on my left hand, that’s one, and when I hold up the thumb and the index finger, that’s two. Actually, we should be more rigorous, since you are imagining my fingers, it actually isn’t one and two, but i and 2i. This is why they call them imaginary numbers.

Let’s continue the process of extending my (imaginary) fingers from the leftmost digits towards the right. When I hold out my whole left hand and the pinky, ring, and middle fingers on my right hand, I have reached 8i.

But this doesn’t look like what I promised. For the final step, we need to remember the geometric interpretation of complex numbers. Multiplying by i is the same thing as rotating counter-clockwise by 90 degrees in the plane. So, let’s rotate our number by 90 degrees and arrive at $\infty$.

I just counted to infinity on my hands.

Of course, I can’t stop at a joke. I need to overanalyze it. There is something for scientists to learn from the error that makes this joke. The disregard for the type of objects and jumping between two different — and usually incompatible — ways of interpreting the same symbol is something that scientists, both modelers and experimentalists, have to worry about it.

If you want an actually funny joke of this type then I recommend the image of a ‘rigorous proof’ above that was tweeted by Moshe Vardi. My writen version was inspired by a variant on this theme mentioned on Reddit by jagr2808.

I will focus this post on the use of types from my experience with stoichiometry in physics. Units in physics allow us to perform sanity checks after long derivations, imagine idealized experiments, and can even suggest refinements of theory. These are all features that evolutionary game theory, and mathematical biology more broadly, could benefit from. And something to keep in mind as clinicians, biologists, and modelers join forces this week during the 5th annual IMO Workshop at the Moffitt Cancer Center.

## Operationalizing the local environment for replicator dynamics

Recently, Jake Taylor-King arrived in Tampa and last week we were brainstorming some projects to work on together. In the process, I dug up an old idea I’ve been playing with as my understanding of the Ohtsuki-Nowak transform matured. The basic goal is to work towards an operational account of spatial structure without having to commit ourselves to a specific model of space. I will take replicator dynamics and work backwards from them, making sure that each term we use can be directly measured in a single system or abducted from the other measurements. The hope is that if we start making such measurements then we might see some empirical regularities which will allow us to link experimental and theoretical models more closely without having to make too many arbitrary assumptions. In this post, I will sketch the basic framework and then give an example of how some of the spatial features can be measured from a sample histology.

## Operationalizing replicator dynamics and partitioning fitness functions

As you know, dear regular reader, I have a rather uneasy relationship with reductionism, especially when doing mathematical modeling in biology. In mathematical oncology, for example, it seems that there is a hope that through our models we can bring a more rigorous mechanistic understanding of cancer, but at the same time there is the joke that given almost any microscopic mechanism there is an experimental paper in the oncology literature supporting it and another to contradict it. With such a tenuous and shaky web of beliefs justifying (or just hinting towards) our nearly arbitrary microdynamical assumptions, it seems unreasonable to ground our models in reductionist stories. At such a time of ontological crisis, I have an instinct to turn — much like many physicists did during a similar crisis at the start of the 20th century in their discipline — to operationalism. Let us build a convincing mathematical theory of cancer in the petri dish with as few considerations of things we can’t reliably measure and then see where to go from there. To give another analogy to physics in the late 1800s, let us work towards a thermodynamics of cancer and worry about its many possible statistical mechanics later.

This is especially important in applications of evolutionary game theory where assumptions abound. These assumptions aren’t just about modeling details like the treatments of space and stochasticity or approximations to them but about if there is even a game taking place or what would constitute a game-like interaction. However, to work toward an operationalist theory of games, we need experiments that beg for EGT explanations. There is a recent history of these sort of experiments in viruses and microbes (Lenski & Velicer, 2001; Crespi, 2001; Velicer, 2003; West et al., 2007; Ribeck & Lenski, 2014), slime molds (Strassmann & Queller, 2011) and yeast (Gore et al., 2009; Sanchez & Gore, 2013), but the start of these experiments in oncology by Archetti et al. (2015) is current events[1]. In the weeks since that paper, I’ve had a very useful reading group and fruitful discussions with Robert Vander Velde and Julian Xue about the experimental aspects of this work. This Monday, I spent most of the afternoon discussing similar experiments with Robert Noble who is visiting Moffitt from Montpellier this week.

In this post, I want to unlock some of this discussion from the confines of private emails and coffee chats. In particular, I will share my theorist’s cartoon understanding of the experiments in Archetti et al. (2015) and how they can help us build an operationalist approach to EGT but how they are not (yet) sufficient to demonstrate the authors’ central claim that neuroendocrine pancreatic cancer dynamics involve a public good.