CDC (Cindy and David’s Conversations) Game: Advising President to Survive Pandemic

Abstract

Ongoing debates on anti-COVID19 policies have been focused on coexistence vs. zero-out strategies, which can be simplified as ″always open (AO)″ vs. ″always closed (AC).″ We postulate that, the middle ground between the two extremes, dubbed LOHC (low-risk open and high-risk closed), is likely more favorable, precluding obviously irrational HOLC (high-open-low-closed). From a meta-strategy perspective, these four policies cover the full spectrum of anti-pandemic policies. We argue that, among numerous factors influencing strategic policy-making, the competence of advisory body such as CDC chief-scientist (say, Cindy) and politics in decision-making body such as president (David), and their cooperation/communication can be critical. Here we investigate anti-pandemic policy-making by harnessing the power of evolutionary game theory in modeling competition/cooperation/communication (three critical processes underlying biological and social evolutions). Specifically, we apply the Sir Philip Sydney (SPS) game, a 4x4 signaler-responder evolutionary game with 16 strategic interactions, which was devised to investigate the reliability of communication that can modulate competition and cooperation, to capture rich idiosyncrasies surrounding today′s anti-pandemic policies. By emulating the reality of anti-pandemic policies today, the study aims to identify possible cognitive gaps and traps. The extended SPS, dubbed CDC (Cindy and David′s Conversations) game, offers a powerful cognitive model for investigating the coexistence/zero-out dichotomy and possible alternatives. The rigorous analytic solutions and extensive simulations suggest a take-home message—keep it persistently simple and rational: while apparently preferred middle-ground LOHC seems to be small-probability (~0.05) event counter-intuitively, the AO and AC policies appears to be large-probability (~0.41-0.53) events.

Ecology of Human Medical Enterprises: From Disease Ecology of Zoonoses, Cancer Ecology Through to Medical Ecology of Human Microbiomes

“…Finally, a slightly off-topic to this review is the field of complexity science, which has enormous potential applications to medicine and medical/disease ecology such as those demonstrated with complex network analyses (e.g., Ellison, 2019, 2021a) and evolutionary game theory (e.g., Ma and Krings, 2011;Ma and Zhang, 2021;Ma and Yang, 2022). Ecosystems are typical complex systems, and ecological science is arguably one of the most successful scientific disciplines where complexity science has achieved extraordinary successes.…”