| I highly recommend Axelrod's short book, The Evolution of Cooperation, for | those (like me) who find it hard to think clearly about trust issues. You | have probably heard about prisoner's dilemma, tit-for-tat etc. Axelrod is a | very early worker in this field. He set up a tournament of programmed bugs | that competed with each other in an artificial environment. They could | survive only by cooperation with other bugs. The could also cheat. I vaguely remember that Axelrod did a few interesting additional papers, on things like geographical propagation of knowledge in iterated prisoner's dilemma, and of behaviour in which the 'bugs' had limited memory as well. Very interesting reading, I'd say. Do anyone know what he have done recently? -Christian