Of course, it is a long stretch from showing equal success in a laboratory game to showing it in the mating game that determines evolutionary outcomes.

ECONOMIST: Human evolution

Game theory is used to understand how decisions are made in fields as diverse as economics and evolutionary biology, and even for a game as simple as coin-flipping it can yield a strategy that gives each player the best chance of winning (or, at least, of coming out even).

ECONOMIST: Quantum computing

To find out if chimpanzees share this sense of fairness, Keith Jensen and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, designed a way for chimps to play the ultimatum game.

ECONOMIST: Evolution