Numfield - another cooperation experiment

This page is a bit of a research page, but it also a gaming page, and I would be glad if it could become a little tournament page..
This page is linked from the Javaboutique , a nice place to hunt for applets of any kind. Thank you!

Few years ago there has been much interest in the repeatet prisoners dilemma as a game between two partners. There have been world wide tournaments in search for good strategies, mathematical, sociological and other analysis. The main message (for me) is, that certain circumstances can turn rational egoists into friendly partners. One of the other points is, if one considers strategies as lifeforms and their reproduction rate to depend on the success in that game against all the other life forms, then uncooperative strategies extinct in the long run. Various successors, variations and extensions (e.g. Knobeln ) of this game have been studied now and there is still more to come. There is a nice, but rather mathematical article with more links. To keep up to date I give you a metacrawler search here .

So here is my variant on that theme: Numfield . The name is a mixture of Number and Battlefield . Numfield is a very abstract game for arbitrary many Players. It offers limited choice, but considerable more than the prisioners dilemma. In iterative mode there is a small carry over from one round to the next, so the game varies slightly. Numfield is not a zero sum game, in fact the players could possibly all win in the long (iterative) run, i.e. the expectation is slightly positive for all players. On the other hand the higher number of possibilies and the game itself leaves a lot of space for uncooperative behaviour.

I've been toying arround with this game for some time and derived a bunch of strategies. But maybe I'm still far from reasonable behaviour. If your browser is Java enabled, you can see some action in the above applet display.

The next pages contain the following: The rules of the game, a java applet which lets various strategies compete and a description how to program your own strategy as a java class. One page shows you the results of contributed programs.
After that page I have a growing bunch of appendices, of interesting side notes.

What I hope to get is some input of ... YOU ... and to put the very best strategies online to let the world see them compete. Of course I will be glad to mention the authors of any strategy.

I hope you are curious now and have a look at the next pages...