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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