€25,000 prize money

Suppose you find yourself in an unfamiliar environment where you don't know how to get food, 
avoid danger, or travel from A to B. Would you invest time working out what to do on your own, 
or observe other individuals and copy them? Do you copy the first individual you see, or the most
 successful? Or just copy the most common behaviour? 


What would you do?


These questions lie at the centre of a scientific challenge with important implications for the 
evolution of learning and culture: What is the best way to learn in a complex, changing world? 
Following the success of the first Social Learning Strategies Tournament1, we have now received 
funding to run a second tournament that builds on the first by allowing for cumulative culture, 
spatial variation, and model-based learning biases. To enter you need to propose a set of rules 
specifying how and when to learn. All entries will be pitted against each other in computer 
simulations with up to €25,000 in prize money to be won.



Closing date for entries is February 28, 2012 

To find out more: lalandlab.st-andrews.ac.uk

The tournament is organized by Kevin Laland and Luke Rendell (University of St Andrews), and 
overseen by a committee of leading scientists: Robert Boyd (UCLA), Sam Bowles (Santa Fe Institute),
Magnus Enquist (University of Stockholm), Kimmo Eriksson (Mälardalen University), Marcus Feldman 
(Stanford University) and Richard McElreath (UCLA).

1 Rendell et al. (2010) Why copy others? Insights from the Social Learning Strategies Tournament.
Science 328: 208-213