Imagine a world that is a really nasty place to live, more or less populated with players that always defect, except there's a little cluster of tit-for-tat players that live in some kind of nucleus and they get to play with each other a lot because they're geographically sequestered. They will start building up a lot of points, and also because that translates into offspring, they'll start to take over the population. So in fact, Axelrod showed that a little island of cooperation can emerge and spread and eventually will take over the world, which is fantastic.
It's crazy how much structure emerges if you just add in repeated encounters and reputation.
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