Self-organization of five species in a cyclic competition game

Sha-Sha Feng and Cheng-Cang Qiang

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2013, vol. 392, issue 19, 4675-4682

Abstract: Cyclic competition game models, particularly the “rock–paper–scissors” model, play important roles in exploring the problem of multi-species coexistence in spatially ecological systems. We propose an extended “rock–paper–scissors” game to model cyclic interactions among five species, and find that two of the five can coexistent when biodiversity disappears, which is different from the “rock–paper–scissors” game. As the number of fingers is five, we named the new model the “fingers” game, where the thumb, forefinger, middle finger, ring finger, and little finger cyclically dominate their subsequent species and are dominated by their former species. We investigate the “fingers” model in two ways: direct simulations and nonlinear partial differential equations. An important finding is that the number of species in a cyclic competition game has an influence on the emergence of biodiversity. To be specific, the “rock–paper–scissors” model is in favor of maintaining biodiversity in comparison with the “fingers” model when the variables (population size, reproduction rate, selection rate, and migration rate) are the same. It is also shown that the mobility and reproduction rate can promote or jeopardize biodiversity.

Keywords: ‘‘Rock–paper–scissors” game; Biodiversity; ‘‘Fingers” game; PDEs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437113004561
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:392:y:2013:i:19:p:4675-4682

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2013.05.033

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().