Age-related preferential selection can promote cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma game

In this paper, we introduce an age-related preferential selection mechanism into the prisoner's dilemma game. Under this mechanism, players can select a source of strategy imitation from their neighbors in a biased way proportional to their ages. Tuned by a selection parameter α, the impact of aging on the evolution of cooperation can be very different. The numerical results show that the cooperation will be effectively promoted by adjusting the value of α. By examining the evolution process and spatial patterns for different values of α, it is found that larger α will effectively promote the formation of large scale of cooperator clusters. In addition, the impact of noise K on the spreading process of cooperation strategy is studied. We find that small K can make cooperation monotonously increase with α, while large K guarantees the optimal existence of cooperation for an intermediate α.