Adaptive co-evolution of strategies and network leading to optimal cooperation level in spatial prisoner''s dilemma game

We study evolutionary prisoner's dilemma game on adaptive networks where a population of players co-evolves with their interaction networks. During the co-evolution process, interacted players with opposite strategies either rewire the link between them with probability $p$ or update their strategies with probability $1-p$ depending on their payoffs. Numerical simulation shows that the final network is either split into some disconnected communities whose players share the same strategy within each community or forms a single connected network in which all nodes are in the same strategy. Interestingly, the density of cooperators in the final state can be maximised in an intermediate range of $p$ via the competition between time scale of the network dynamics and that of the node dynamics. Finally, the mean-field analysis helps to understand the results of numerical simulation. Our results may provide some insight into understanding the emergence of cooperation in the real situation where the individuals' behaviour and their relationship adaptively co-evolve.