Evolution in Minority Games I. Games with a Fixed Strategy Space

Abstract

In this paper we study the minority game in the presence of evolution. In particular, we examine the behavior in games in which the dimension of the strategy space, m, is the same for all agents and fixed for all time. We find that for all values of m, not too large, evolution results in a substantial improvement in overall system performance. We also show that after evolution, results obey a scaling relation among games played with different values of m and different numbers of agents, analogous to that found in the non-evolutionary, adaptive games. Best system performance still occurs, for a given number of agents, at m_c, the same value of the dimension of the strategy space as in the non-evolutionary case, but system performance is now nearly an order of magnitude better than the non- evolutionary result. For m<m_c, the system evolves to states in which average agent wealth is better than in the random choice game,despite (and in some sense because of) the persistence of maladaptive behavior by some agents. As m gets large, overall systems performance approaches that of the random choice game.