This book both summarizes the basic theory of evolutionary games and explains their developing
applications giving special attention to the 2-player 2-strategy game. This game usually
termed a 2×2 game in the jargon has been deemed most important because it makes it possible to
posit an archetype framework that can be extended to various applications for engineering the
social sciences and even pure science fields spanning theoretical biology physics economics
politics and information science. The 2×2 game is in fact one of the hottest issues in the
field of statistical physics. The book first shows how the fundamental theory of the 2×2 game
based on so-called replicator dynamics highlights its potential relation with nonlinear
dynamical systems. This analytical approach implies that there is a gap between theoretical and
reality-based prognoses observed in social systems of humans as well as in those of animal
species. The book explains that this perceived gapis the result of an underlying reciprocity
mechanism called social viscosity. As a second major point the book puts a sharp focus on
network reciprocity one of the five fundamental mechanisms for adding social viscosity to a
system and one that has been a great concern for study by statistical physicists in the past
decade. The book explains how network reciprocity works for emerging cooperation and readers
can clearly understand the existence of substantial mechanics when the term network reciprocity
is used. In the latter part of the book readers will find several interesting examples in
which evolutionary game theory is applied. One such example is traffic flow analysis. Traffic
flow is one of the subjects that fluid dynamics can deal with although flowing objects do not
comprise a pure fluid but rather are a set of many particles. Applying the framework of
evolutionary games to realistic traffic flows the book reveals that social dilemma structures
lie behind traffic flow.
