The Evolution of Co-operation by Robert Axelrod is based on a seminal article about Prisoner’s Dilemma and what it can teach us about human co-operation and reciprocity. The book outlines the game and then discusses a famous tournament at which different strategies / algorithms were evaluated for their success in winning the most points.

The heart of the book is the comparison of these approaches and the analysis of the winning one. The winner used a very simple algorithm, to always co-operate on the first round of the game and then copy what the other player did on the previous move for subsequent rounds. For those who just want to know the basics, just read the original paper, but if you want to go deeper then this book is an interesting read.