Simple adaptive strategy wins the prisoner's dilemma

The prisoner's dilemma has become the leading paradigm to explain the evolution of cooperation among selfish individuals. Here, we present an adaptive strategy that implements new mechanisms to process information about past encounters. The history of moves is summarized in an internal state which then determines the subsequent move. This enables the strategy to adjust its decisions to the character of the current opponent and to adapt the most promising strategic behavior. For this reason, we call such strategies Adaptor. Through evolutionary simulations, we demonstrate that the concept of Adaptor leads to strategic patterns that are (a) highly cooperative when playing against kin, (b) stable in a sense that goes far beyond the concept of evolutionary stability, (c) robust to environmental changes, i.e. variations of the parameter values and finally (d) superior in performance to the most prominent strategies in the literature.