I imagine it would be possible to programm a multi level hierarchy so that "point providers" (although probably not the "suicide bombers" ) can still give an advantage to their higher-ups in later iterations of the tournament. Also, I imagine having a lot of offspring from the first iteration gives a statistical advantage to the "masters" , especially since they just can use a forgiving tit for tat strategy when their opponent doesn't identify as a member of the cult.

I thought tit-for-tat - strategies were shown to be powerless against swarming the competitions with master / slave bots, where the first few exchanges are a code to establish whether an alliance exists and the slaves are programmed to destroy non-allied participants regardless of the cost to themselves and to give points to their masters. That would explain why cults seem to be doing really well in reality right now.