Monday 30 July 2018

Wallace Coffee Talks - 02 August 2018

Wallace Coffee Talks - Summer 2018

02 August 2018 - 1pm - Zoology Museum

Frances Ratcliffe (Swansea University, UK)
Between art and science - personal meander


Why the big jump? This is the question on the tip of everyone’s tongue when I describe the meandering route I took from studying Fine Art to doing a PhD in Fish Biology. Through presenting examples of my work as well as work of those that have inspired me, I will try to answer this question, describing my journey from conceptual art, via scientific illustration, to finally pursuing science. I hope to explain how, these two seemingly unrelated disciplines have much to offer each other and have a lot more in common than one might think. Finally, I will invite you to discuss how data visualizers can take inspiration from scientific illustrators, opening up new avenues for communication. 



Alejandra Cabanillas (Swansea University, UK)
Small world network and the Prisoner's dilemma: how does cooperation survive?
Cooperation is observed across multiple species and a range of life histories, from slime molds to apes, hence the interest in a general explanation for the emergence and persistence of this behaviour within social groups. Evolutionary game theory, using models like the Prisoner’s dilemma, has been employed to investigate these questions. The distribution of links among interacting players in games like the Prisoner’s dilemma provides an interesting avenue to study how social populations evolve under different interaction networks. Small world network (SWN) connectivity allows regular (e.g., nearest neighbour) networks to gradually be altered to completely random interaction networks. We studied how SWNs affected the invasion of cheaters into a spatially structured population of cooperators, varying the relative pay-offs for cheaters and the proportion of randomised links among players in an otherwise regular interaction network. We recorded the time a defector takes to invade the population, the final stable proportion of each strategy (cooperator or cheater) and the variability in this proportion across different network structures. SWNs facilitate the invasion of defectors at lower pay-off levels than regular networks, by preventing the formation of blocks of cheaters and the reduced payoffs associated with those interaction blocks. In this scenario, the lower scoring cooperators are at an evolutionary disadvantage, as cooperation clusters can’t easily be formed to resist invasion. For a specific range of payoffs, the speed of invasion is significantly facilitated by the proportion of randomised links present. SWN links therefore influence the speed and stable state of evolutionary dynamics.




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