Princeton University mathematicians discovered a previously unknown strategy for the prisoner’s dilemma, which guarantees one player a better outcome than the other. As the game has been widely used to understand to situations like the climate change negotiations or the Cold War, the new findings will surely rise a couple of questions.
That’s a monumental surprise. Theorists have studied Prisoner’s Dilemma for decades, using it as a model for the emergence of co-operation in nature. This work has had a profound impact on disciplines such as economics, evolutionary biology and, of course, game theory itself. The new result will have impact in all these areas and more. — Technology Review
Much more information in the paper: Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma contains strategies that dominate any evolutionary opponent