Evolutionary dynamics of hyperbolic language
Fig 3
Meanings often change over time due to misaligned interests.
(a): Changes in the speakers’ perception of their lexica. In each generation, we keep track of whether or not the most probable word used for a state among the population changes (swaps). Tallying the number of swaps gives one measure of change in lexical meaning over time. Note that while a word can be most probable for more than one state, we require a swap lead to changing in the overall strategic ranking of available words in the eyes of the population of speakers (b): The average number of word-swaps per generation in all twelve games, with k = 100 and μ = 0.001. The blue line denotes a linear best-fit. (c): Changes in the listeners’ perception of their lexica. Similar to (a), we tally the number of changes in the most probable action for the listeners in response to a word. However, unlike in (a), here we measure simply the steps (in Hamming distance) between the previous and current generation. (d): The average number of action swaps per generation in all twelve games, with k = 100 and μ = 0.001. The blue line denotes a linear best-fit. All panels here are for the asymmetric game, but the symmetric game has nearly identical results, see Fig H in S1 File. The overlapping game symbols for Γ = 1 are II,III, and for Γ = 2 are IV,V,VI.