Conditions for the Evolution of Apology and Forgiveness in Populations of Autonomous Agents

We report here on our previous research on the evolution of commitment behaviour in the one-off and iterated prisoner's dilemma and relate it to the issue of designing non-human autonomous online systems. We show that it was necessary to introduce an apology/forgiveness mechanism in the iterated case since without this restorative mechanism strategies evolve that take revenge when the agreement fails. As before in online interaction systems, apology and forgiveness seem to provide important mechanisms to repair trust. As such, these result provide, next to the insight into our own moral and ethical considerations, ideas into how (and also why) similar mechanisms can be designed into the repertoire of actions that can be taken by non-human autonomous agents.