Combination with anti-tit-for-tat remedies problems of tit-for-tat.

One of the most important questions in game theory concerns how mutual cooperation can be achieved and maintained in a social dilemma. In Axelrod's tournaments of the iterated prisoner's dilemma, Tit-for-Tat (TFT) demonstrated the role of reciprocity in the emergence of cooperation. However, the stability of TFT does not hold in the presence of implementation error, and a TFT population is prone to neutral drift to unconditional cooperation, which eventually invites defectors. We argue that a combination of TFT and anti-TFT (ATFT) overcomes these difficulties in a noisy environment, provided that ATFT is defined as choosing the opposite to the opponent's last move. According to this TFT-ATFT strategy, a player normally uses TFT; turns to ATFT upon recognizing his or her own error; returns to TFT either when mutual cooperation is recovered or when the opponent unilaterally defects twice in a row. The proposed strategy provides simple and deterministic behavioral rules for correcting implementation error in a way that cannot be exploited by the opponent, and suppresses the neutral drift to unconditional cooperation.

Duality between cooperation and defection in the presence of tit-for-tat in replicator dynamics.

The prisoner's dilemma describes a conflict between a pair of players, in which defection is a dominant strategy whereas cooperation is collectively optimal. The iterated version of the dilemma has been extensively studied to understand the emergence of cooperation. In the evolutionary context, the iterated prisoner's dilemma is often combined with population dynamics, in which a more successful strategy replicates itself with a higher growth rate. Here, we investigate the replicator dynamics of three representative strategies, i.e., unconditional cooperation, unconditional defection, and tit-for-tat, which prescribes reciprocal cooperation by mimicking the opponent's previous move. Our finding is that the dynamics is self-dual in the sense that it remains invariant when we apply time reversal and exchange the fractions of unconditional cooperators and defectors in the population. The duality implies that the fractions can be equalized by tit-for-tat players, although unconditional cooperation is still dominated by defection. Furthermore, we find that mutation among the strategies breaks the exact duality in such a way that cooperation is more favored than defection, as long as the cost-to-benefit ratio of cooperation is small.

Finite-time and finite-size scaling of the Kuramoto oscillators.

Phase transition in its strict sense can only be observed in an infinite system, for which equilibration takes an infinitely long time at criticality. In numerical simulations, we are often limited both by the finiteness of the system size and by the finiteness of the observation time scale. We propose that one can overcome this barrier by measuring the nonequilibrium temporal relaxation for finite systems and by applying the finite-time-finite-size scaling (FTFSS) which systematically uses two scaling variables, one temporal and the other spatial. The FTFSS method yields a smooth scaling surface, and the conventional finite-size scaling curves can be viewed as proper cross sections of the surface. The validity of our FTFSS method is tested for the synchronization transition of Kuramoto models in the globally coupled structure and in the small-world network structure. Our FTFSS method is also applied to the Monte Carlo dynamics of the globally coupled q-state clock model.

Diffusion on a heptagonal lattice.

We study the diffusion phenomena on the negatively curved surface made up of congruent heptagons. Unlike the usual two-dimensional plane, this structure makes the boundary increase exponentially with the distance from the center, and hence the displacement of a classical random walker increases linearly in time. The diffusion of a quantum particle put on the heptagonal lattice is also studied in the framework of the tight-binding model Hamiltonian, and we again find the linear diffusion like the classical random walk. A comparison with diffusion on complex networks is also made.

Human bipedalism and body-mass index.

Body-mass index, abbreviated as BMI and given by M/H 2 with the mass M and the height H, has been widely used as a useful proxy to measure a general health status of a human individual. We generalise BMI in the form of M/H p and pursue to answer the question of the value of p for populations of animal species including human. We compare values of p for several different datasets for human populations with the ones obtained for other animal populations of fish, whales, and land mammals. All animal populations but humans analyzed in our work are shown to have p ≈ 3 unanimously. In contrast, human populations are different: As young infants grow to become toddlers and keep growing, the sudden change of p is observed at about one year after birth. Infants younger than one year old exhibit significantly larger value of p than two, while children between one and five years old show p ≈ 2, sharply different from other animal species. The observation implies the importance of the upright posture of human individuals. We also propose a simple mechanical model for a human body and suggest that standing and walking upright should put a clear division between bipedal human (p ≈ 2) and other animals (p ≈ 3).

Interrupted coarsening in the zero-temperature kinetic Ising chain driven by a periodic external field.

If quenched to zero temperature, the one-dimensional Ising spin chain undergoes coarsening, whereby the density of domain walls decays algebraically in time. We show that this coarsening process can be interrupted by exerting a rapidly oscillating periodic field with enough strength to compete with the spin-spin interaction. By analyzing correlation functions and the distribution of domain lengths both analytically and numerically, we observe nontrivial correlation with more than one length scale at the threshold field strength.

Theory of fads: traveling-wave solution of evolutionary dynamics in a one-dimensional trait space.

We consider an infinite-sized population where an infinite number of traits compete simultaneously. The replicator equation with a diffusive term describes time evolution of the probability distribution over the traits due to selection and mutation on a mean-field level. We argue that this dynamics can be expressed as a variant of the Fisher equation with high-order correction terms. The equation has a traveling-wave solution, and the phase-space method shows how the wave shape depends on the correction. We compare this solution with empirical time-series data of given names in Quebec, treating it as a descriptive model for the observed patterns. Our model explains the reason that many names exhibit a similar pattern of the rise and fall as time goes by. At the same time, we have found that their dissimilarities are also statistically significant.

Network robustness of multiplex networks with interlayer degree correlations.

We study the robustness properties of multiplex networks consisting of multiple layers of distinct types of links, focusing on the role of correlations between degrees of a node in different layers. We use generating function formalism to address various notions of the network robustness relevant to multiplex networks, such as the resilience of ordinary and mutual connectivity under random or targeted node removals, as well as the biconnectivity. We found that correlated coupling can affect the structural robustness of multiplex networks in diverse fashion. For example, for maximally correlated duplex networks, all pairs of nodes in the giant component are connected via at least two independent paths and network structure is highly resilient to random failure. In contrast, anticorrelated duplex networks are on one hand robust against targeted attack on high-degree nodes, but on the other hand they can be vulnerable to random failure.

Nonequilibrium work by charge control in a Josephson junction.

We consider a single Josephson junction in the presence of time varying gate charge, and examine the nonequilibrium work done by the charge control in the framework of fluctuation theorems. Assuming first a high quality junction with negligible Ohmic current, we obtain the probability distribution functions of the work and confirm the Crooks relation to give the estimation of the free energy changes ΔF=0. The reliability of ΔF estimated from the Jarzynksi equality is crucially dependent on protocol parameters, while the Bennett's acceptance ratio method yields consistently ΔF=0. We examine the behaviors of the work average and point out its relation to heat and entropy production associated with the circuit control. Finally considering finite tunnel resistance we discuss dissipation effects on the work statistics.

Phase transition in a coevolving network of conformist and contrarian voters.

In the coevolving voter model, each voter has one of two diametrically opposite opinions, and a voter encountering a neighbor with the opposite opinion may either adopt it or rewire the connection to another randomly chosen voter sharing the same opinion. As we smoothly change the relative frequency of rewiring compared to that of adoption, there occurs a phase transition between an active phase and a frozen phase. By performing extensive Monte Carlo calculations, we show that the phase transition is characterized by critical exponents ß=0.54(1) and ν[over ¯]=1.5(1), which differ from the existing mean-field-type prediction. We furthermore extend the model by introducing a contrarian type that tries to have neighbors with the opposite opinion, and show that the critical behavior still belongs to the same universality class irrespective of such contrarians' fraction.

Cluster-size heterogeneity in the two-dimensional Ising model.

We numerically investigate the heterogeneity in cluster sizes in the two-dimensional Ising model and verify its scaling form recently proposed in the context of percolation problems [Phys. Rev. E 84, 010101(R) (2011)]. The scaling exponents obtained via the finite-size scaling analysis are shown to be consistent with theoretical values of the fractal dimension d(f) and the Fisher exponent τ for the cluster distribution. We also point out that strong finite-size effects exist due to the geometric nature of the cluster-size heterogeneity.