Role of memory effect in the evolution of cooperation based on spatial prisoner's dilemma game

We investigate the impact of memory effect on the evolution of cooperation in the spatial prisoner's dilemma game, in which each player will record his own strategies during the previous M game rounds (here, M is also named as the memory length). At each time step, each individual will update his current strategy according to the Fermi-like probability which will be multiplied by a pre-factor, and this factor will be correlated with the fraction of previous strategy states identical with the individual strategy to be updated. The numerical simulation results demonstrate that the memory length will largely influence the cooperation level at the stationary state, and it is clearly shown that the intermediate value of M will optimally favor the emergence of cooperation and the dynamical evolution, and characteristic patterns also support these conclusions. In addition, we depict the full cooperation phase diagrams and find that the cooperation region will be broadened under the case of moderate M values. The current results also indicate that the limited memory may be enough for us to design the effective promotion mechanism and further understand the emergency of cooperation taking place upon many networked populations. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.