The good, the bad, the well-connected

Abstract

In this paper, we analyse a variation of truel competitions in which each prospective player is represented by a node in a scale-free network. Without the inclusion of any particular spatial arrangement of players, traditional game theory suggests that in many truel settings the strongest player often has the lowest probability of survival, a result which has been popularised by the term survival of the unfittest. However, both our single run and the Monte-Carlo simulations suggest that this particular notion does not hold in scale-free networks. The spatial structure and arrangement of players are crucial for the outcome of truels, as in scale-free networks the number of players surviving the competition positively depends on their marksmanship (i.e. the strongest players indeed have the highest probability of survival).