Speaker
Description
Scissors cut Paper, Paper wraps Rock, and Rock blunts Scissors: the classic game of Rock
Paper-Scissors offers a simple yet compelling model of cyclic dominance. That dynamics is
frequently used to illustrate competition between populations or strategies in evolutionary
game theory and biology and can be observed in a variety of ecological systems.
We consider a Lotka-Volterra model for three competing species, which exhibits periodic
solutions associated with a limit cycle. This model can be extended in several ways: via a
reaction-diffusion framework, where species move continuously in space, or through a
network of habitats, where species disperse between discrete patches.
In this talk, we analyze the stability and instability of the periodic solutions in both
extensions. Furthermore, we demonstrate the relationship between the stability criteria of
these systems and discuss their evolution within the instability regions, showing that the
growth of the coupling constant can lead to the desynchronization of oscillations.
Bibliography
Sorin, Idan, et al. “Stability of Oscillations in the Spatially Extended May-Leonard Model.” arXiv:2502.18048, arXiv, 25 Feb. 2025. arXiv.org, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2502.18048.
Sorin, Idan, and Alexander Nepomnyashchy. “Desynchronization of Strongly Nonlinear Oscillations by Coupling Strengthening.” arXiv:2511.22724, arXiv, 27 Nov. 2025. arXiv.org, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.22724.
