2007 IACAP Goldberg Award Recipient

The International Association for Computing and Philosophy is pleased to announce this year's winner of the Brian Michael Goldberg Memorial Award for outstanding graduate student work in the field of computing and philosophy.

This year's recipient is Rory Smead, University of California, Irvine, for his paper, "The Evolution of Cooperation in the Centipede Game with Finite Populations." Mr. Smead will present his paper at the North American Computing and Philosophy Conference to be held July 26th - 28th, 2007, at Loyola University in Chicago. An abstract of the paper appears below.

The Goldberg Award is sponsored by the department of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. It is made possible by a generous gift from Dr. Gerald and Nancy Goldberg in memory of their son Brian Michael Goldberg. To learn more, see http://www.ia-cap.org/awards-goldberg.php.

For more on the NA-CAP 2007 Conference, visit http://na-cap.osi.luc.edu/.

Paper Abstract:

The partial cooperation displayed by subjects in the Centipede game deviates radically from the predictions of traditional game theory. Even standard, infinite population, evolutionary settings have failed to provide an explanation for this behavior. However, recent work in finite population evolutionary models has shown that such settings can produce radically different results from the standard models. This paper examines the evolution of partial cooperation in finite populations revealing that finite populations can be conducive to the evolution of partial cooperation. The results reveal a new possible explanation that is not open to the standard models and gives us reason to be cautious when employing these otherwise helpful idealizations.