# Moran Process on Graphs¶

The library also provides a graph-based Moran process [Shakarian2013] with MoranProcess. To use this feature you must supply at least one Axelrod.graph.Graph object, which can be initialized with just a list of edges:

edges = [(source_1, target1), (source2, target2), ...]


The nodes can be any hashable object (integers, strings, etc.). For example:

>>> import axelrod as axl
>>> from axelrod.graph import Graph
>>> edges = [(0, 1), (1, 2), (2, 3), (3, 1)]
>>> graph = Graph(edges)


Graphs are undirected by default but you can pass directed=True to create a directed graph. Various intermediates such as the list of neighbors are cached for efficiency by the graph object.

A Moran process can be invoked with one or two graphs. The first graph, the interaction graph, dictates how players are matched up in the scoring phase. Each player plays a match with each neighbor. The second graph dictates how players replace another during reproduction. When an individual is selected to reproduce, it replaces one of its neighbors in the reproduction graph. If only one graph is supplied to the process, the two graphs are assumed to be the same.

To create a graph-based Moran process, use a graph as follows:

>>> from axelrod.graph import Graph
>>> axl.seed(40)
>>> edges = [(0, 1), (1, 2), (2, 3), (3, 1)]
>>> graph = Graph(edges)
>>> players = [axl.Cooperator(), axl.Cooperator(), axl.Cooperator(), axl.Defector()]
>>> mp = axl.MoranProcess(players, interaction_graph=graph)
>>> results = mp.play()
>>> mp.population_distribution()
Counter({'Cooperator': 4})


You can supply the reproduction_graph as a keyword argument. The standard Moran process is equivalent to using a complete graph with no loops for the interaction_graph and with loops for the reproduction_graph.