 appears as Appendix A in their paper.
About the name
Oh, if you are wondering why it’s called the Prisoner’s Dilemma, that is because of a story that has been told to explain this game since shortly after its discovery. The story goes that two men, having engaged in a joint criminal enterprise, are apprehended by the law and interrogated separately. Each prisoner is given the opportunity to reduce his own sentence by testifying against the other – but that testimony will increase the prison sentence handed down to the other man, and if both testify then there will be evidence enough to put both behind bars for longer than if neither had. In this version the payoffs are prison sentences rather than cash prizes: it has the same paradoxical quality that each prisoner individually is always better off by defecting, but collectively they would be better to invoke their right to remain silent.
On the topic of names, did you know that the phrase Tit for Tat is the origin of the rhyming slang ‘titfer’, meaning a hat?
- Conversation on The Edge website with William Poundstone, Bill Press & Freeman Dyson, and Karl Sigmund & Martin Nowak.
- Technical paper with all the details, by Press and Dyson.
- Discussion paper by Stewart and Plotkin.
- Mike Shulman attacks “hype and misinterpretation” of the Press-Dyson result in a long blog post that includes a clear but detailed explanation of the Press-Dyson theorem.
- The aforementioned interactive toy.