Interaction stochasticity supports cooperation in spatial Prisoner's dilemma

Previous studies mostly assume deterministic interactions among neighboring individuals for games on graphs. In this paper, we relax this assumption by introducing stochastic interactions into the spatial Prisoner's dilemma game, and study the effects of interaction stochasticity on the evolution of cooperation. Interestingly, simulation results show that there exists an optimal region of the intensity of interaction resulting in a maximum cooperation level. Moreover, we find good agreement between simulation results and theoretical predictions obtained from an extended pair-approximation method. We also show some typical snapshots of the system and investigate the mean payoffs for cooperators and defectors. Our results may provide some insight into understanding the emergence of cooperation in the real world where the interactions between individuals take place in an intermittent manner.