David Maiullo setting up a demo before lecture
Department of Physics and Astronomy
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Alex Morozov’s paper on the Prisoner's Dilemma is getting lots of attention
(June 4, 2026)
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a famous idea in game theory, It involves two players who can either cooperate or cheat. Cheating always seems to pay off more, so both players end up cheating and losing out even though working together would have given them the biggest reward.
Yet there is a paradox here since the "emergence of complex life would be impossible without cooperation between biological entities such as genes, cells, or organisms."
Recently Physics and Astronomy Professor Alex Morozov and his collaborator, Alexander Feigel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem studied the game and found that cooperation can emerge naturally without special rules or genetic ties. What it needs is for a player's strategy to depend on the identity of the opponent. Their work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 18. There is also a Rutgers Today story about the study, written by Kitta MacPherson.
