Games may be life with all the hard bits removed, but they provide a way to study why people make the choices they make. Traditional games are usually played against a static background: the rewards per outcome are constant. That limits their relevance to behavior because, in real life, the rewards and consequences of strategic choices are ever changing. Now, researchers have used a mathematical model to study a series of games that include evolving strategies and randomly varying returns. A bit of history Perhaps the most famous game-theory contest is the prisoner’s dilemma. In the prisoner’s dilemma, a pair of thieves have been captured and are being separately interrogated by the police
