Evolutionary prisoner's dilemma game with dynamic preferential selection

We study a modified prisoner's dilemma game taking place on two-dimensional disordered square lattices. The players are pure strategists and can either cooperate or defect with their immediate neighbors. In the generations each player updates its strategy by following one of the neighboring strategies with a probability dependent on the payoff difference. The neighbor selection obeys a dynamic preferential rule, i.e., the more frequently a neighbor's strategy was adopted by the focal player in the previous rounds, the larger probability it will be chosen to refer to in the subsequent rounds. It is found that cooperation is substantially promoted due to this simple selection mechanism. Corresponding analysis is provided by the investigation of the distribution of the players' impact weights, persistence, and correlation function. © 2006 The American Physical Society.