Chimpanzees Better Strategists Than Humans

Scientists have demonstrated through a game with rewards that chimpanzees make better moves than humans to maximize their payoffs.

AsianScientist (Jun 17, 2014) – A team of scientists from Japan and the US has found that game-playing chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) make more strategic choices than do humans, accurately anticipating their competitor’s moves to maximize individual payoffs.

Led by Dr. Colin Camerer, Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics at the California Institute of Technology, the team investigated the responses by pairs of chimpanzees at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University and pairs of humans in a game they called the “Inspection Game.”

The Inspection Game involved two players—of the same species—each choosing one of two blue boxes on the left or right side of a computer screen. The first player has a “hiding” role that requires choosing the opposite of the opponent’s selection, whereas the second player has a “seeking” role that requires making the same selection as the opponent’s. Winning players are rewarded payoffs: a chimpanzee receives food, while a human receives a small coin.

The research, which was published in Nature: Scientific Reports, revealed that the patterns of gameplay choices made by chimpanzees closely matched the Nash equilibrium or accurate-guessing predictions, whereas human choices deviated from the Nash equilibrium. The Nash equilibrium is the predicted outcome based on the assumption that players are rational and seek to maximize their expected payoff, or reward.

According to the team, one plausible explanation is that chimpanzees are as good, or better, at competitive interaction and at adjusting toward equilibrium choices from experience than humans are. This explanation may in turn be backed by evolutionary processes leading to differences in human and chimpanzee behaviors.

“Our new evidence of more responsive learning and adjustment in competitive experiments by chimpanzees, and evidence of the prevalence of competition in their ecology, supports the interpretation of game theory as an evolutive theory,” the authors wrote. “(In other words) equilibrium game theory will apply particularly well to strategy choices… honed by evolutionary value and (for the chimpanzees) regularly practiced in development and into adulthood.”

The article can be found at: Martin et al. (2014) Chimpanzee choice rates in competitive games match equilibrium game theory predictions.

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Alan Aw is a maths enthusiast who likes sharing the fun and beauty of science with others. Besides reading, he enjoys running, badminton, and listening to (and occasionally playing) Bach or Zez Confrey.

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